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Short Story Review: “The Door to Saturn” by Clark Ashton Smith
(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.) Who Goes There?
Last time I reviewed a Tanith Lee piece, and Lee is one of the two returning authors from last October; the other is Clark Ashton Smith. Of the big three (or four, if we count C. L. Moore) voices of Weird Tales during its 1930s heyday, Smith might be my favorite just in terms of how pleasurable he is to read on a paragraph-by-paragraph level. Whereas Robert E. Howard was a master of action, Lovecraft a master of atmosphere, and Moore a sort of jack of all trades, Smith had an intimidating capacity to conjure raw imagination through his prose, which is often hypnotic, colorful, and occasionally hard to grasp without a thesaurus on hand. His style of writing is a bit divisive. Isaac Asimov was outspoken about disliking Smith’s writing, which makes sense since Asimov handled prose like a mechanic would handle his tools while Smith thought himself a poet first and foremost. The result is that his stories often read like dark-hued prose poems.
Between 1929 and 1934 Smith wrote a truly staggering amount of short fiction (and it was always short fiction, since except for a novel he wrote as a teenager he never wrote longer than novelette-length), which resulted in several series. Today’s story, “The Door to Saturn,” takes place in Hyperboria, a mythical continent that’s set in a distant alternate past—one where prehistory and wizardry coexist. It’s also here that we’re met with the sorcerer Eibon, which should ring a bell if you’re into the Cthulhu mythos since the Book of Eibon is one of those fictional texts that gets cited there. Eibon is Smith’s creation and one of several examples of Smith and Lovecraft influencing each other, although as far as I can tell “The Door to Saturn” is the only story where he’s a main character.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales, which is on the Archive. I’ll be honest, I partly chose this story because I needed an excuse to pull up Wesso’s cover for this issue, it being one of my favorite covers for any pulp magazine. As for other appearances, “The Door to Saturn” has never been anthologized in English, but it’s made a pretty steady number of appearances in Smith collections over the years, including Lost Worlds in 1944, Hyperborea in 1971, The Emperor of Dreams in 2002, and The Door to Saturn: Volume Two of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith in 2007. It was also printed in the November 1964 issue of Magazine of Horror (available on the Archive), which is funny to me because it’s really not a horror story; on the contrary, this is a planetary romance that sees Smith at his most upbeat and humorous.
Enhancing Image
Morghi, an inquisitor and zealot of the elk-goddess Yhoundeh, has come to Eibon’s pentagondal abode with a posse, with the intent of bringing the dark wizard to justice. It’s a surprise raid, which makes Eibon’s absence all the more surprising. Where the hell could the bastard have gone? He could not have known about the raid in advance, except maybe by consulting his god, the ape-like Zhothaqquah. As the zealots search every corner and crack of the tower, Morghi finds a series of paintings, sculptures, and works of pottery on the highest floor, all of them seemingly ancient, many of them depicting Zhothaqquah in some way.
On each of the five walls there hung one of the parchment paintings, all of which seemed to be the work of some aboriginal race. Their themes were blasphemous and repellent; and Zhothaqquah figured in all of them, amid forms and landscapes whose abnormality and sheer uncouthness may have been due to the half-developed technique of the primitive artists. Morghi now tore them from the walls one by one, as if he suspected that Eibon might in some manner be concealed behind them.
(This is a fairly concise paragraph by Smith’s standards.)But curiously, behind one of these paintings is a metal panel large enough to fit a person and which seems to function like a door, opening outward on its hinges; problem is that it would open into the outside where one would fall into the sea. This is assuming it’s a normal panel, which it’s not. It’s at this point that we flash back to Eibon’s POV, sometime before the raid, in which he has a chat with Zhothaqquah—as you do. Zhothaqquah had made a deal with the dark wizard in which Eibon is granted one means of escape, in the event that the fuzz come for him and he wouldn’t be able to elude them by natural means, or even with the power of his sorcery. The panel on that topmost floor is a portal, opening to Cykranosh, known to us as Saturn, millions of miles away, with the likelihood of anyone else going through it and finding Eibon being practically 0% (making Morghi’s subsequent entry pretty miraculous!). The catch is that this is a last resort: once you go through the portal, returning to Earth is basically impossible.
Shifting POVs in a short story can be tricky, but here I think the shift early on from Morghi to Eibon (before taking on an omniscient perspective) was called for, even if it treats the portal as a mini-twist. Smith was never a great plotter and so the opening scene reads more like a necessary evil than anything, so that we can get to the good stuff; it’s the weakest part of the story, but it’s brief enough as to not be a grind. Once we’re on Saturn (I’m calling it that and not Smith’s name for it because I prefer to use words that could feasibly exist), the game is afoot. The bad news for Eibon is that it doesn’t take long for Morghi to find him; the good news (for Eibon anyway) is that arresting him is now pointless since they’re both stuck here. They have to work together to survive, and in Eibon’s case he has to find connection here, since Zhothaqquah had gone through Saturn and indeed there’s an abundance of intelligent life here.
This, of course, is not the Saturn we know: it’s not a gas giant, evidently, and the air is breathable for humans. Mars or Venus would’ve made more sense in the context of ’30s SF (indeed “The Door to Saturn” qualifies as what we now call science-fantasy, sort of in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mode), but I think Smith wanted an even more exotic locale which is farther away from Earth and more unusual in appearance. Saturn is famous for its rings, but Smith goes the extra mile to present even its terrain as unusual, using his knack for language as a tool to accomplish this. A common tip for writing is “Don’t use a two-syllable word when a one-syllable word will do,” or something like that, but Smith always heads in the opposite direction. It’s not enough for there to be rivers of liquid metal, they have to be rivers of “liquescent” metal. The sky is “greenish-black” and “was over-arched from end to end with a triple cyclopean ring of dazzling luminosity.” “Sulphurescent” is apparently not a real word, but it conveys well the harsh smell of the planet’s air. Here, Smith uses alien language to describe an alien place.
(Worth mentioning that word processors really hate Smith, given the exotic names of his own invention along with made-up words that sound like they might be real but aren’t, not to mention vice versa.)
Speaking of which, the main alien race of the story are the Bhlemphroims, a hairy bipedal race with their heads fused to their upper abdomens such that they lack necks, and who bear a resemblance to Zhothaqquah; indeed they are related, but the Bhlemphroims no longer worship that god, nor any god to speak of. A race of unbelievers. When Eibon tries to persuade them with a phrase Zhothaqquah had passed on to him, they don’t react, but they do thank Our Heroes™ for having (unwittingly) returned one of their livestock—a reptilian beast with dozens of tiny legs, so enormous that when Eibon and Morghi encounter it they don’t even see its head from ground level. The Bhlemphroims, being a docile and unimaginative race, give Our Heroes™ a warm welcome, even offering them up as husbands for the lead female, who needs mates and is not discerning as to the race.
This proves to be a huge problem. For one, the “national mother” is what you would call a looker, being a ginormous and gelatinous creature, having been selected out of the many females and fed over time so as to be able to give birth to a whole generation of Bhlemphroims. The prospect of mating with such a creature is horrifying. “Thinking of the mountainous female they had seen, Morghi was prone to remember his sacerdotal vows of celibacy and Eibon was eager to take similar vows upon himself without delay.” That’s right, you’re seeing a joke in a Clark Ashton Smith story; and I’ll be honest, this particular one cracked me up. There are actually several jokes made through the third-person narrator, who proves to be a bit snarkier than what you’d expect for an old-school weird tale. “The Door to Saturn” is a planetary adventure, but it’s also a surprisingly effective comedy.
An even more severe problem than the prospect of making love to a mountain of alien flesh is that the national mother, like the female praying mantis, devours her mates after copulation. The Bhlemphroims are a peaceful race, but they also see getting eaten by the national mother as a profound honor. Lovecraft was probably asexual, and refrained from bringing up sex even implicitly in his fiction (with one or two exceptions), but Smith had no such qualms, with his male characters experiencing temptation and jealousy, and with flowers often symbolizing attraction (but also malicious deception). In this case the national mother is a stand-in for a deeply unattractive woman whom Our Heroes™ want to avoid. Now, rejecting their obligations to the Bhlemphroims and getting the hell out of Dodge will prove to be quite the challenge, right? Sounds like a recipe for adventure.
There Be Spoilers Here
It’s pretty easy, as it turns out.
There are several moments of playful irony in “The Door to Saturn” that help make it considerably less self-serious than the usual Smith story. Subverting what was already a well-worn pulp trope of the time (the alien race being akin to violent savages), the Bhlemphroims are so peaceful that they just let Eibon and Morghi go on their merry way, simply uncomprehending as to why such men would deny the national mother. When they meet the Ydheems, who are also related to Zhothaqquah and who are, unlike the Bhlemphroims, still true believers, Eibon uses the phrase Zhothaqquah had bestowed on him—a phrase that, unbeknownst to Eibon, simply means “Be on your way.” The saying ends up saving both Our Heroes™ and the Ydheems, as it convinces them to move out of their village just as an avalanche (of giant mushrooms) is about to decimate it. There’s irony in that Eibon accidentally saves a race of people (just as Our Heroes™ had before accidentally saved one of the Bhlemphroims’ livestock), but also there’s the implication that Zhothaqquah had basically told his most devoted human disciple to fuck off. It’s funny to think about.
The irony continues when we’re informed at the end that, since Morghi had vanished into the portal and was never seen again, his minions took to thinking he had been in cahoots with Eibon the whole time, and as a result the cult currounding Yhoundeh collapses; this is all right before an Ice Age comes over Hyperboria, no doubt leading to a mass extinction event. Life on Saturn ain’t easy (although being a savior to the Ydheems grants a few luxuries), but Eibon and Morghi remain blissfully unaware that they have it better on such a desolate planet than in their homeland, which is about to become nigh uninhabitable. At first “The Door to Saturn” seems like it might be a straightforward weird tale, the ironies start to snowball so that by the end it has become a grim but playful comedy. This is all uncharacteristically fun-loving for Smith, but I’m not complaining.
A Step Farther Out
Of the three Smith stories I’ve reviewed so far, this one is my favorite. Whereas “Vulthoom” (review here) was largely mediocre because it reads as Smith trying to write an “accessible” SF story of the time, “The Door to Saturn” is 100% Smith, which means some will find it impenetrable. I don’t mind because I tend to like Smith’s style, but this is also a fun yarn. The way Eibon and Morghi play off each other is entertaining on its own, but their adventure on a Saturn that never was, coming across some pretty inventively envisioned alien races, is where the fun is really at. If anything this is a story I would recommend to people who are curious about Smith that at the same time doesn’t water down what makes him unique—even if it doesn’t give one the impression that he normally skews towards horror.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Jedella Ghost” by Tanith Lee
(Cover art by Dominic Harman. Interzone, September 1998.) Who Goes There?
Tanith Lee was one of the most prolific writers of the macabre and the weird of the past half-century, up until her somewhat recent death. I should check out more Lee at this point but she wrote a truly staggering number of novels across several series and I have commitment issues. She’s one of the codifying voicess of what we now call dark fantasy. She’s also, if memory serves me right, the only person to get more than one issue of Weird Tales (its ’80s/’90s revival) dedicated to her. Lee is one of two authors I’m covering this month who were also part of last year’s spooktacular, and I’ll be honest, my first taste of her fiction left me less than satisfied. The good news is that second chances sometimes pay off and this is one of them, with today’s story being a winner, if also hard to categorize.
Despite what the title may suggest, “Jedella Ghost” is not a horror story—except maybe by way of implication; it’s also not a tale of the supernatural, despite what the title would lead you to believe. Indeed, one could argue this story is not SFF, but I would wager it falls under the banner of science fiction, or at least speculative fiction. Explaining this will involve spoilers, so I’ll hold my tongue on that, but I’ll say now that this is a haunting character study that had a surprisingly tight grip on my imagination after I had finished reading it. If my first encounter with Lee didn’t seem promising then this is—at least for me—a much finer impression of her talents.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September 1998 issue of Interzone, which is on the Archive. It has since been reprinted three times, first in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), which was what tipped me off that this story is more than what it seems. Then there are the collections Tanith by Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee and the more comprehensive Tanith Lee A-Z. Worth mentioning that both of the Lee collections were published only after her death.
Enhancing Image
John Cross is not a savior, despite what the obvious symbolism of his name would imply (it’s a trick Lee plays on us), but he is a writer, which might be the next best thing. He’s a minor celebrity who lives in a quiet little town… somewhere. It’s unclear when or where we are, but John’s mannered style of narration and the wooded location lead me to believe we’re in the US—maybe New England—in the first half of the 20th century. Lee puts a good deal of effort into making this story, which was published 25 years ago (not a long time ago in literary terms), read as older than it is—one could say aged, which is not to say dated. Anyway, things have been going normal, until one day when the town gets an unusual visitor in the form of Jedella, a young woman who claims to have come from the pines.
She’s polite with people, and John admits to finding her attractive, but there are a few eerie things about Jedella: for one, she’s wearing what appear to be glass slippers (like it’s The Wizard of Oz), although she says she doesn’t know what they’re made of. She also claims to have lived in a house with people in it, except these people are not part of a family unit, and that for reasons unbeknownst to Jedella the house has been abandoned. When Jedella sees a few village elders on a bench she stands there staring at them, as if transfixed, and more tellingly she later confesses to not knowing what a funeral is. She seems to have no conception of aging or death. Most troublingly of all, she claims to be 65 years old despite her looks.
Lee does something clever here is that she makes us think, repeatedly, that something malicious is brewing with Jedella. We’re led to believe, through her bizarre interactions with people and the inexplicableness of her life, that surely there’s something going on behind the scenes—that Jedella, despite her innocence, is planning something. Either she is the perpetrator of some crime yet unseen, or she is the victim of some very unusual circumstances. Should we be wary around Jedella or should we pity her? Both we and John are drawn to her specifically because she seems unreachable, even maybe impossible to rationalize. As John says at one point, “The woman you can’t have is always fascinating.” Worth mentioning that John is telling this story a few decades after having first met Jedella, and he’s quite an old man now. The passage of time works in very funny ways in this story. We get a sense of the eerie and even the uncanny, but not suspense, since the events of this story happened long ago and have long since been resolved.
A different writer—maybe a male writer—might’ve turned John and his younger friend Luke’s shared infatuation with Jedella into a full-on love triangle, but Lee makes the wise decision to push any pretense of romance to the sidelines. Jedella is so disconnected from normal human life (for a reason that will be given later) that something as irrational and multifaceted as romance would be likely impossible—even ill-advised. Instead we focus on the implications of Jedella’s existence and how she sees the world, and what—assuming we exclude the supernatural—could’ve produced such a character. The fact that it was published in Interzone and that it was later reprinted in an SF anthology lead us to think the explanation is something that can be rationalized; but the title, the archaisms of the setting, and Jedella’s ghostly nature make us doubt ourselves. After all, we as readers tend to be materialists, unless something even hinting at the supernatural points to the contrary, at which point we become superstitious.
There Be Spoilers Here
Eventually John decides to retrace Jedella’s steps and try to find out where she came from, which is what leads us to the big reveal. In the wood, in a house which stands as if made of cubes, something “a child had made, but without a child’s fantasies,” we meet Jedediah Goëste, a man who at this point would be at least ninety years old but who is still active and sound enough of mind to let us know what had happened. Jedella claims she’s 65 and this is correct, because about six decades ago Jedediah—when he was in his 20s—adopted a very young Jedellah, who was an orphan. With the cooperation of his servants and with a whole house as his laboratory, Jedediah got the bright idea to answer a pretty esoteric question: “What would happen if you raised someone in a controlled environment for decades, in which they never discovered death, illness, or even old age?” The answer, Jedediah supposes, is that the person would stop aging past a point.
The ethical problems are obvious, and John is quick to point these out. At the same time, can it be considered abuse? It’s certainly unlike any kind of abuse you’d find in the real world. Jedella was apparently never beaten or scolded, and eventually she was allowed to run off the plantation, so to speak. Rather, Jedediah and his successors (since he himself left once he got too old) set up a system so as to shield Jedella—not so much from the sufferings of the world as the passage of time itself. Nothing dies or decays, or rather nothing is allowed to appear that way. Jedella recalls a childhood memory wherein she saw a squirrel get “stunned” and then revived by one of the house servants, when in reality the squirrel had died and was replaced with a different one. The experiment, however, has been taken about as far as it can go, and now it’s up to John and the townsfolk to take care of Jedella for the last years of her life—assuming she ever dies. The ending, which is pretty powerful for how it blurs the line between real life and something like magic realism, implies that she has started to age, now having lived outside her controlled environment for a few decades (she would be probably a century old at story’s end), and incredibly this revelation does not destroy her. No, time finally continuing is taken as a kind of victory.
Finally, I wanna try to answer a question of my own: What is this story? It’s not horror, nor is it a ghost story in the classic sense. My argument is that it’s science fiction, for the simple reason that it asks a what-if question that could, theoretically, apply to the real world as we might understand it. Sure, we don’t have goblins or elves, nor are these things possible, but it is possible (albeit incredibly protracted and convoluted) to run an extended experiment in which you take a person at an age where they wouldn’t understand basic concepts like death and aging, and you put them in an environment where they aren’t exposed to these things for however many years. What would be the result? It’s scientific, and it’s fiction, not to mention that the ending hints at something that is out of the ordinary.
A Step Farther Out
I’ve read three or four Lee stories at this point, and I do think “Jedella Ghost” is easily the most impressive of the ones I’ve read. Then again, it’s not really a horror story; there’s a bit of the eerie about it, with Jedella’s characterization and her backstory, but there are no scares to speak of. It’s arguably not even science fiction (although I would argue it is), which makes its publication (not to mention getting the cover) in Interzone a little hard to explain. The Lee stories I’ve read have put new spins on old archetypes, like vampires and werewolves, and with “Jedella Ghost” she managed to write a ghost story that conveys a supernatural eeriness without containing anything supernatural, even if the ending challenges one’s notion of time.
Now, rather than continue to act as a series of disembodied text blocks, I’ll be upfront with you about how my life’s been going. Not good. I’m at a bit of a low point and I’ve struggled to enjoy reading for the past couple weeks, and I have to admit I’ve enjoyed writing about what I’ve been reading even less. You might notice there was no editorial post on the 15th this month; sorry about that. I might be able to write up a belated editorial in a few days, before the month is out, but I can’t guarantee it. I’m taking a couple steps to improve my Mental Health™, and while it might be advisable to take a break from writing, I’ve long been of the opinion that the show must go on.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Brenda” by Margaret St. Clair
(Cover art by Evan Singer. Weird Tales, March 1954.) Who Goes There?
One of the unsung heroes of ’50s SFF, Margaret St. Clair got her start in the latter half of the ’40s and spent the next fifteen years writing short fiction at a mile a minute. Unfortunately by the ’60s she turned mostly to writing novels, and not very prolifically at that. Still, St. Clair’s best short fiction still reads as fresh, ferocious, subversive, witty, and rather concise today. I tackled her urban fantasy story “The Goddess on the Street Corner” a few months ago, so it hasn’t been very long since our last encounter. St. Clair is no stranger to weird fiction and today’s story, “Brenda,” is definitely a weird story. I was surprised to learn that while it didn’t get turned into a Twilight Zone episode, it did become a segment of Night Gallery. Is it horror, as one would expect of source material for a show that’s mainly horror-themed? Hmmmm. I’ll try to explain in the body of this review, because I’m not totally sure what to make of the story.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1954 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in the anthology Twisted (ed. Groff Conklin) and later Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Reader (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Carol Serling, Charles G. Waugh). Then there are the St. Clair collections The Best of Margaret St. Clair and The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales; thankfully the latter is recent and still in print.
Enhancing Image
Brenda is a preteen living on an island… somewhere. It’s implied to be a tourist attraction, what with the mentioning of summer people, but it’s unclear if this is off the coast of, say, New England, or the British Isles. It’s a small island with an even smaller population, with only six families currently staying. Everybody knows each other, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Brenda feels alienated from other kids. We’re not told exactly what’s wrong with her; she seems, on the face of it, like a normal girl (although in the Night Gallery adaptation she’s coded as having some kind of mental didability), but we’ll soon learn that Brenda does not take to strange or dangerous situations like other girls.
While playing by herself in the forest one day she comes across a strange man—one who is probably not entirely human. The man doesn’t have any lines, but just going by how he’s described it’s easy to get that he’s the “weird” element of the story.
He was not a tramp, he was not one of the summer people. Brenda knew at once that he was not like any other man she had ever seen. His skin was not black, or brown, but of an inky grayness; his body was blobbish and irregular, as if it had been shaped out of the clots of soap and grease that stop up kitchen sinks. He held a dead bird in one crude hand. The rotten smell was welling out from him.
A sludgy humanoid creature with a strong rotten smell. Where he came from is never given. If not for a later event it’s easy to think the man is merely a figment of Brenda’s imagination, and for the story’s purposes he might well be. What’s unusual, though, is that Brenda isn’t threatened by this creature—not really. She runs away, sure, but more like she’s playing a game than if she was in mortal peril. She then tricks the creature into falling into a deep quarry, whose purpose itself is a mystery and whose deliberate lack of explanation might be the only “scary” moment in the story; otherwise this is a rather whimsical narrative.
St. Clair can say a lot with few words, but I have to admit this is the most abstract story of hers I’ve read thus far. We don’t know where we are, we don’t get much about Brenda’s backstory and nothing that would explain her behavior, and not helping things is that the third-person narrative is totally divorced from Brenda’s state of mind. The result is that we’re only able to understand what’s going on through action and dialogue, with Brenda’s train of thought being locked off for the reader. This makes it hard to rationalize the strange relationship she takes on with the sludgy creature, whom she seems to think of as both like a sideshow attraction and a kindred spirit—something to mock but also relate with.
There Be Spoilers Here
The creature eventually gets out of the quarry and the men of the island (all five of them) band together to get it back in the pit; what’s curious is that they don’t kill it, but instead entrap it and build up a mound of stones around it. “The men of Moss Island must have worked hard all day to pile up so much rock.” Even curiouser: the creature doesn’t die—not even after being stuck under that mound for a year. We discover this following a one-year time skip, wherein Brenda matures into a teen girl and becomes a lot more charismatic, although still a troublemaker and what we would call an odd duck.
The blurb at the start of the story says something about “waiting to be born,” and it’s a phrase Brenda uses at the end when reuniting with the creature, a mound of rock between them but the creature’s presence still being discernible. I don’t know what the fuck this phrase means. It has to do something with coming of age, but I’m not sure what the connection between Brenda and the creature is supposed to be. The fantastical element at the heart of this story blurs rather than illumines what should be a straightforward tale about a girl coming to maturity. Please let me know in the comments if I’m a dumb piece of shit who couldn’t understand this story’s subtext.
A Step Farther Out
Between the time I started this review and finishing it I decided to check out the Night Gallery segment that adapted this story, out of curiosity. Was not good, would not recommend. It’s a reasonably faithful adaptation but the acting is atrocious, and even at 25 minutes it’s a bit overlong. More importantly, I thought the story being translated to visuals would make the central theme more clear, but that was not the case. “Brenda” is a coming-of-age narrative, that much is obvious, but the symbolism of the sludgy creature and the phrase “waiting to be born” is surprisingly obtuse. It’s also a weird tale that I would not describe as horror. St. Clair can be a chameleon when it comes to genre but I have to admit this one went over my head; if only I could figure out what she was up to.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Pipeline to Pluto” by Murray Leinster
(Cover art by William Timmins. Astounding, August 1945.) Who Goes There?
A name I would not have expected to see during spooky season, and I’m the one who came up with this whole thing. Murray Leinster got his start way back—like back even before Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. He debuted in the 1910s and only stopped about five years before his death in 1975; a scareer spanning over half a century is impressive on its own, but also consider the radical changes happening in genre SF during that time. Most of the writers who were popular in the ’20s and early ’30s failed to make the transition with John W. Campbell’s takeover of Astounding, but Leinster, if anything, got better during that transition phase. Leinster was pushing fifty in 1945, and whereas most writers by that age would rest on their laurels, his career was about to have its Indian summer.
1945 was kind of a turning point for Leinster, whose fiction not only rose in quality but also, shockingly, there would be more of it. It’s here that we get two of Leinster’s most famous short stories, “First Contact” and “The Ethical Equations,” both being about dilemmas and space travel. “Pipeline to Pluto” is also about voyaging across the stars (well, across our solar system), but it does not have the humanistic touch of “First Contact.” No, this is a savage story for Leinster—uncharacteristically so. Not burying the lead this time, so I’ll say now that this is a short and brutal yarn, and genuinely creepy despite the fact that I’m not sure if I would call it “horror.”
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in Science Fiction Terror Tales (ed. Groff Conklin) and the Leinster collections The Best of Murray Leinster and First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster. Honestly, if not for that one anthology appearance, this would not have blipped on my radar as something appropriate for October.
Enhancing Image
The good news (I suppose) is that there’s a mining colony on Pluto, but the bad news is that the distance between Earth and Pluto is unfathomably long, such that space shuttles are expensive—too expensive just to ship cargo to and from the planets. Thus we’re introduced to the carriers: unmanned ships that cruise at low inertia, one lane heading to Pluto, the other heading back to Earth. It saves money on shipping cargo, but the carriers are also slow as shit, with a trip one way taking about three years. The thing is that there’s one carrier landing on Pluto and one landing on Earth every day, or so that’s the estimation. Mining on Pluto is tough work but its pays well, and some people will try to forego a costly shuttle trip and get to Pluto through “the Pipeline,” on one of those carriers as a stowaway.
Remember that this was written a mere fifteen years after Pluto was discovered and 24 years before the moon landing—before people had any idea how expensive space travel would actually be. (Read: It would be a lot more expensive than as depicted in the story.)
Enter Hill, a scruffy blue-collar guy who talks like a 1930s gangster and who doesn’t wanna give up the money for a proper shuttle. He meets up with Crowder, who works at the carrier shipyard. Hill knows people can bribe their way into getting on a carrier and Crowder knows he himself is the sort of person who can be bribed. There is one thing Hill knows that Crowder doesn’t, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Apparently Hill managed to buy another guy’s “ticket” for the carrier and he’s desperate to get on, seemingly at any cost. Of course it costs money to get food and enough shelter for the trip, but Crowder says he can arrange that.
At first I thought maybe characters were just gonna talk a certain way in this story (the ’30s gangster thing), but Crowder and his crony Moore talk more or less like normal people. Leinster lays Hill’s accent on rather thick, but it’s to show that this man has done his time—probably hard time. We get the gist with Hill pretty quickly, and while he’s definitely framed as an anti-hero, there is a nasty little trick Leinster has hidden up his sleeve about him. The characters in “Pipeline to Pluto” are not dull, but they’re also function-only in the sense that they exist to serve the plot. With the exception of what the third-person narrator grants us (some pretty important information, mind you), this could work as a one-act play.
About that narration, though. It’s during Hill’s talk with Crowder that we break away to get a rather long exposition dump about the very short history of stowaways on the Pipeline and the effects of traveling in what amounts to a huge tin can in space. The results are very bad. This sounds obvious to us now, but people can be surprisingly ignorant about the fact that space is a vacuum; then again, one would think the characters here would be aware of those effects. I can’t go further without getting into spoilers, but I’ll say that Leinster does something rather unusual here in he gives us, the reader, info via narration that (so we’re led to believe) the characters might not be aware of. The characters all know more than they let on, but that’s where the story gets really spicy—and a little scary.
There Be Spoilers Here
So Hill is unaware that he’s being set up for a death trap, right? WRONG. He had gone to this same shipyard a year prior, trying to pay his way into one of the carriers, and luckily for him his carrier had gotten picked up by the so-called Space Patrol not long after takeoff. Hill did hard time for that, sure, because what he did was illegal, but he survived on account of not being subjected to the harshness of space for long. He discovered the effects of space travel without proper protection first hand, and so he knew that other stowaways were being sent unknowingly to their deaths. Of course, whether those stowaways lived or died was of no concern to the guys who made money off of it. Crowder, Moore, and Slim the security guard (who’s implied to be in on the racket) would not remember Hill, considering he’s just one of dozens of people they sent off in metal coffins, but Hill sure does remember them. And he has a plan in mind.
What exactly happens when you’re in one of those carriers?
The hundred-foot cylinders drifting out and out and out toward Pluto contained many stowaways. The newest of them still looked quite human. They looked quite tranquil. After all, when a carrier is hauled aloft at four gravities acceleration the air flows out of the bilge-valves very quickly, but the cold comes in more quickly still. None of the stowaways had actually suffocated. They’d frozen so suddenly they probably did not realize what was happening. At sixty thousand feet the temperature is around seventy degrees below zero. At a hundred and twenty thousand feet it’s so cold that figures simply haven’t any meaning. And at four gravities acceleration you reach a hundred and twenty thousand feet before you’ve really grasped the fact that you paid all your money to be flung unprotected into space. So you never quite realize that you’re going on out into a vacuum which will gradually draw every atom of moisture from every tissue of your body.
The ending, thus, is pretty satisfying, if also grim. Hill gets the upper hand on the three racketeers and ties and gags them inside the carrier they were supposed to put him in. Hill is taking vengeance for himself, but also the dozens of people who took a one-way ticket to Pluto, unaware of the effects of exposure to cold vacuum. Leinster pulls a neat trick on us by revealing the story to be a revenge narrative when we were led to believe it would be something more coldly scientific—maybe about the wonders of the Pipeline. Or hell, have the twist be that Hill has fallen for a racket and gets sent to his doom, but maybe that was too obvious for Leinster. It helps that the story does not overstay its welcome.
A Step Farther Out
Is the science outdated? Absolutely. Doesn’t really bother me if the story is good. I’m not someone with a scientific background, nor am I really a science enthusiast; if bad science doesn’t get in the way of a good story then I’m fine with it. It’s about ten pages but it establishes a future method of space travel, its logical implications, some characters, and with a savage twist to boot. Short and bitter, you might say. I will say, however, that “Pipeline to Pluto” is not a good place to start with Leinster, because it’s very much an outlier as far as his science fiction goes. This is something to check out if you’re curious about a side of Leinster we don’t normally see.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “The Ancient Mind at Work” by Suzee McKee Charnas
(Cover art by Pete Turner. Omni, February 1979.) Who Goes There?
Wake up, fuckers, it’s Friday the 13th.
Suzee McKee Charnas is an example of how a bad first run-in with a good writer can turn you off from them unfairly. I had read Charnas’s Hugo-winning story “Boobs” about a year ago and hated it; not that it was a bad story exactly, it was well done, but I was too repulsed by its gore and its implications even as a horror connoisseur. I say it’s unfair, because my second try with her proved much more promising. Unfortunately Charnas didn’t write too much despite her career spanning five decades, and she’s one of those writers who started out as a novelist before trying her hand at short fiction. “The Ancient Mind at Work” was Charnas’s first short story, but she already had two novels in print by then, and this story itself would become the prologue for her 1980 episodic novel The Vampire Tapestry. Yes, this is a story about vampirism—but it’s also science fiction.
Now, as a site specializing in reviewing fantastical fiction published in the genre magazines (like what James Blish did back in the day), I am cheating slightly here, because Omni was not strictly speaking a genre magazine; it was firstly a science magazine, mostly filled with science articles, interviews, and artwork. The fiction only made up a fraction of Omni‘s wordage, but it’s what people remember today because the fiction (and it was always SF or fantasy) was of unusually high quality. Omni produced a disproportionate number of award-winning and -nominated stories, although “The Ancient Mind at Work” is not one of those.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the February 1979 issue of Omni, which is on the Archive. I don’t recommend downloading the PDF since the already barely legible text is horribly compressed. Crazy that this magazine had a peak circulation of over a million considering reading it was so physically uncomfortable as to irritate my scoliosis. “The Ancient Mind at Work” was reprinted on its own in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Ninth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Fantasy Annual III (ed. Terry Carr), and The Fourth Book of Omni Science Fiction (ed. Ellen Datlow). It hasn’t been in print as a standalone since 1985, but of course you can find it as the first part of The Vampire Tapestry, which does seem to be in print.
Enhancing Image
Katje is, as she calls herself jokingly, “an old woman of fifty, more gray than blond, with lines and bones in the face,” a Dutch South African who moved to America some years ago for the sake of love. Unfortunately her hussband, who was college faculty, died, leaving Katje a widow and taking on a job as housekeeper for the campus. Having not worked when she was married, it’s safe to say Katje is not a fan of her current position in life; she went from being a respected farmer’s daughter in the old country to practically the bottom of the food chain. She doesn’t really have any friends, only begrudgingly hanging around one Miss Donelly, and Jackson, the local maintenance guy. Then there’s Dr. Weyland, a silver-haired fox of a professor who studies sleep, drives around in a fancy car, is perhaps the most eligible bachelor on campus, and has probably never said a word to Katje before—which only gives her more reason to wonder about him.
I was debating with myself as to what I should consider spoilers for this story, since the “twist” here is something the reader would already know if going into the novel it became a part of; as such I’m gonna give away upfront that Weyland is not a normal man, but a vampire. It’s something Katje suspects (or maybe she just wants to believe) from the outset, but it doesn’t get confirmed outright until the climax. Still, with hindsight this can’t really be called a twist since even a cursory glance at The Vampire Tapestry shows that a) Weyland is the vampire of the title, and b) he’s the main recurring character—the connecting tissue of that novel. Of course, Katje doesn’t have any solid evidence for thinking Weyland is a vampire; she sees the professor come out of his lab one night with a younger man who looks deeply weary and thinks the younger man is one of Weyland’s victims. We know that Katje is right, but as far as she knows she could just be a bored widow who fantasizes about a professor who’s notorious for his looks and solitude.
A few things to say about Katje, because she’s not your normal horror protagonist, or at least she doesn’t read like one now. I’m not sure if this is just something Charnas does (I’ve only read two of her stories so who can say), but she has a knack for writing really unpleasant viewpoint characters. Katje is an anti-heroine: she doessn’t do anything heroic, she doesn’t really think about other people’s problems, she’s prideful, she’s needlessly cynical, and she’s more than a little racist. Any interaction between a white woman and black man (and vice versa) is going to have some undertone about it, and the interactions between Katje and Jackson are especially uncomfortable; and since we’re given insight into Katje’s thoughts we know she feels oddly resentful about having to treat black Americans as equals. This is a character flaw that really struck me at first, and indeed if Stephen King had been given the same plot outline I think he would’ve scrubbed off Katje’s racism, or at least made it more obvious that she’s in the wrong. Katje is unpleasant, but she’s realistically unpleasant, and Charnas doesn’t excuse her, whereas a writer less keen on moral greyness would.
Anyway, for all her faults, Katje is sort of pitiful, and she feelss a weird sort of pity for Weyland as well, at least on the assumption that he’s a however-many-centuries-old vampire, the ancient mind of the title. Both are solitary figures who intentionally keep their distance from other people, albeit for different reasons as it turns out. Katje is an immigrant and Weyland is probably a thousand miles from where he started. There’s a really good line in here about alienation: “One did not have to sleep half a century to lose one’s world these days; one had only to grow older.” Some really good lines in this story, but this one stood out to me. It’s especially effective, never mind new for its time, because we don’t often get genre stories about women who are middle-aged or older. As for their connection, it could be that Katje sees Weyland as a kindred spirit, or at the very least a distraction from the dull everydayness of her life, and indeed she does eventually admit to herself that she’s doing all this before her life is a hollow shell.
Now, The Vampire Tapestry is sometimes cited as a fantasy novel and it made the Locus poll for Best Fantasy Novel, but unless there’s a development later in that novel that contradicts me I’m gonna call it science fiction. Going back to James Blish for a moment, his story “There Shall Be No Darkness” (review here) took on the enormous task of justifying lycanthropy in scientific terms, intentionally devoid of the supernatural. Charnas does a similar thing with “The Ancient Mind at Work,” at least if we’re to take Weyland’s indirect explanation for vampirism at face value. There’s this lengthy scene where Katje sits in for one of Weyland’s lectures, and there’s this huge digression where the professor humors his students about vampirism—presumably explaining his own vampirism in the process. Vampires, so Weyland says, would not be ghostly creatures of the night, but humanoids who are closely related to homo sapiens but who have followed a different evolutionary line. There would be very few vampires, but they would be apex predators, since after all, they feed on man and the most dangerous game is man. Here, the vampire would not conflict with Darwinian evolution.
There’s also some fun ribbing of vampire cliches. Why should a vampire be allergic to garlic of all things? Why should a vampire be weak to holy symbols? Why feed on humans specifically? Never mind that this takes place in a world where people are very familiar with such cliches. Just as Blish’s story takes place in a world where people have seen The Wolf Man, Charnas’s is one where people have read Dracula and even I Am Legend. (I have to think it’s set in the ’70s, since there are little things like a woman wearing a “save the whales” shirt that would’ve been very much in vogue then.) Katje, given her background, seems like she belongs in 1900 and not circa 1975, which made me unsure of the story’s modernity at first, but it makes sense since she’s a woman profoundly out of step with her time and place. This is a uniquely modern narrative that could not have been written prior to—let’s say 1940 at the earliest, because it hinges on both a public acceptance of Darwinian evolution and a public awareness of vampire cliches. Combine all this with Charnas’s implicit but thorny feminism and you have something that still reads as modern.
There Be Spoilers Here
This one is a bit hard to spoil, huh?
The big question for me was if Katje survives her encounter with Weyland (because the two meeting face to face was inevitable), and thankfully she does. What’s interesting is that even if she became one of Weyland’s victims, she might’ve survived, at least according to the man himself. (A remorseless vampire is probably not the most reliable source, but Weyland is also something even spookier than a vampire: an academic.) Luckily for Katje she had a piece on her (there have been sexual assaults and even a murder around campus as of late), and while she doesn’t kill Weyland (it’s ambiguous in the story itself if he lives or not, but we know he lives because of The Vampire Tapestry and all that), she does fuck him up a good deal. As it turns out, vampires that are basically humans with super-long lifespans and a thirst for blood handle bullets about as well as the average human. It’s a fun subversion. But will Katje return at some point in the novel, or is this the end of her story? She finds something like closure by the end, or at least realizes that maybe she should count more on the people in her life, so I’m fine if we never hear from her again.
A Step Farther Out
As a standalone narrative, ignoring its greater context, “The Ancient Mind at Work” is a gripping and psychologically dense SF-horror story that feels like a cat-and-mouse game par excellence; as an advertisement for The Vampire Tapestry it’s perhaps even more effective. I was tempted to order a copy as soon I had finished this story. Weyland being a vampire is so heavily telegraphed that it arguably doesn’t count as a twist, and indeed it’s not a twist but the very premise of the novel, but despite that I was still on edge because Katje is such a fully realized and flawed character. Charnas proves here that a mythical creature like the vampire can still be threatening when given a dose of 20th century rationalism.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “The Naturalist” by Maureen F. McHugh
(Cover artist uncredited. Subterranean, Spring 2010.) Who Goes There?
The recent reprint of Maureen McHugh’s debut novel China Mountain Zhang may have raised awareness of this not-too-prolific writer for young readers like myself. McHugh has only written four novels across her 35-year career, and at least one of these, Nekropolis, is a major expansion of her short story of the same name. (Mission Child might also be an expansion of “The Missionary’s Child” but I’m not sure about the connection there.) Despite this, and her short fiction output being sporadic, she’s one of the more respected SFF writers of recent times. China Mountain Zhang was a Hugo and Nebula finalist and is considered one of the unsung classics of ’90s SF, which means a rediscovery may be on its way. “The Naturalist” is sort of a horror story but is more an SF narrative that tackles horror tropes in a rationalistic manner, even if its language is unusually salty. We’re gonna be talking about zombies today.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the Spring 2010 issue of Subterranean Online. Subterranean Press shut down their online magazine nearly a decade ago and so now it’s inaccessible—in the present tense. With the power of the Wayback Machine we can read these issues online and for free, so no excuses! “The Naturalist” was then reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Five (ed. Jonathan Strahan) and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2011 Edition (ed. Paula Guran). It’s also in the McHugh collections After the Apocalypse: Stories.
Enhancing Image
The zombie apocalypse has happened—and been contained, sort of. Unlike most zombie apocalypse scenarios the American government is still around, which is how you know upfront that this will be a very pessimistic narrative. Rather than be allowed to roam the whole country, the monsters have been quarantined and put in “zombie preserves,” where criminals can also be sent; at least that’s my understanding of the situation, since while there is a bit of worldbuilding the machinations of the outside world are a little outside our protagonist’s comprehension. Cahill is our guy and by no means is he a hero, being “too stupid to live, and probably a liability.” He starts out in one of these zombie preserves, with a pack of men who are largely even bigger pieces of shit than he is. Life on the reservation is not good but things get worse when there’s in-fighting one day, capped off with an air strike implied to have been made by the military that sends Cahill off by his lonesome, stuck with zombies and without anyone to rely on.
A few questions. Are thee zombies shamblers or runners? Shamblers! I prefer the former, even though it does strain one’s suspension of disbelief that creatures this fucking slow could take over the world. When they’re not attacking humans the zombies in this story are even slower than the ones in George Romero’s movies, since rather than walk around passively they often just… stay there. Or lie down, like they’re tired. Again I’m not sure how we’re supposed to lose so many people to creatures that are positively glacial in their movement, but also remember that the zombie outbreak has more or less been contained—at least in the US. We’re not really told about what’s happening in other countries. I don’t even remember what city this is supposed to be taking place in; it’s sort of abstract like that. The stakes are also rather low because it’s not like we’re trying to escape the apocalypse or meet up with loved ones here. Cahill doesn’t know anybody and he basically stays in the preserve by choice.
I don’t have too much to say about this story, but I’m not sure if that’s because of the story itself or because I’m extremely jaded with zombie media. “The Naturalist” was published right before zombie media was to reach critical mass and become seriously oversaturated, which is not exactly its fault but it reads like McHugh was riding a trend at the time. We still get zombie media, but it’s hard to overstate how in the latter half of the 2000s through much of the 2010s there was this seemingly infinite barrage of zombie stories across every narrative form possible—except music I guess. The Walking Dead premiered in 2010 and the original comics were already popular. We had just gotten Left 4 Dead and its sequel. World War Z was super-popular and I remember reading it in like 7th or 8th grade; then there was the movie, which had fucking nothing to do with the book. Of all the stock monsters, the zombie must’ve suffered the most from trends and oversaturation in a relatively short period of time. Even the runner, as popularized in 28 Days Later (there were also running zombies in Return of the Living Dead, and maybe there’s an older example I’m forgetting), seemed fresh compared to Romero’s shamblers, but those too grew stale.
Much of the narrative can be thought of as like a road trip, with Cahill making observations during his travels and even coming across a few humans along the way—although those interactions never turn out well, and it’s not clear how much of that is Cahill’s fault. He’s not evil, but he’s certainly a grotesque and a bit of an uncanny figure; the narrator even compares him to Charles Manson at one point, in looks if not behavior. He’s like a mountain man, except his environment is urban decay instead of actual wilderness. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when describing what Cahill is carrying that McHugh focuses first on the essentials that one would need for surviving in the wild, plus a couple very small luxuries, with the weaponry coming second. Get a load of this:
He had a back pack [sic] now with water, a couple of cans of Campbell’s Chunky soups—including his favorite, chicken and sausage gumbo, because if he got stuck somewhere like the last time, he figured he’d need something to look forward to—a tub of Duncan Hines Creamy Homestyle Chocolate Buttercream frosting for dessert, a can opener, a flashlight with batteries that worked, and his prize find, binoculars. Besides his length of pipe, he carried a Molotov cocktail; a wine bottle three-fourths filled with gasoline mixed with sugar, corked, with a gasoline soaked rag rubber-banded to the top and covered with a sandwich bag so it wouldn’t dry out.
What’s curious is that McHugh did not title this story “The Survivalist,” even though that’s a word that’s likelier to come to people’s minds. Sure, Cahill is a survivalist, but he mainly takes pleasure in observing the behavior of the zombies around him—almost like he’s studying them. Right-wing survivalist narratives have been a thing since at least the ’70s, but the zombie story tends to be the most consistently and outwardly left-leaning out of the stock monsters, showing the failings of capitalism and government and often focusing on the destructive potential of human greed. Indeed, while Cahill does some rephrensible things later, every human he comes across is shown to be untrustworthy at the very least. You’d think the government still being cohesive and active would be a good sign, but we’re also shown quickly that the government has no qualms with killing its own citizens without provocation. This is one of those downbeat narratives where the protagonist is shitty, but the people around them are worse.
There Be Spoilers Here
Some stuff happens.
Okay, there’s more to it than that. The plot is rather episodic; you could cut it done some without removing context for the ending. The third-person narrator is highly colloquial (by that I mean they curse slightly more often than me), but at the same time is tight-lipped about what Cahill could be thinking—assuming he has thoughts. As such it’s ambiguous when Cahill runs into a few people and, with some degree of aggression, traps them and offers them as food for the zombie mob. Cahill is a murderer, objectively, but we’re not sure why he’s doing this since it’s not like he gets a sort of perverted thrill out of these ordeals. What he’s doing does make more sense if you take on the mindset of humans becoming little more “human” than the zombies—or that the zombies aren’t monsters but very dumb animals. Too uneducated and maybe too alienated from everything to work as a scientist, Cahill studies zombie behavior, using other people (who presumably are fellow criminals, since this is a reserve still) as bait.
But then, when he wasn’t asking for it, he gets rescued. “There’d been some big government scandal. The Supreme Court had closed the reserves, the President had been impeached, elections were coming.” These little pockets of disorder are being evacuated and the zombies are now to be killed off in earnest. On a macro scale this is a victory for humanity, and would be a conventional happy ending if it didn’t also mean Cahill’s way of life was coming to an end. It’s doubtful if he can ever return to normal society, and again that pessimism creeps up one last time.
A Step Farther Out
I’ve read very little McHugh before, my main exposure being her Hugo-winning alternate history story “The Lincoln Train.” For what it’s worth, these are very different stories and I’ll probably read China Mountain Zhang next month or in December. I didn’t enjoy “The Naturalist” very much but that may have to do with how extremely tired I am with zombie narratives. We don’t normally judge a story harshly for not breaking new ground, but despite some details that hint at McHugh’s talent for psychology and worldbuilding I got a sense of déjà vu with this one. It doesn’t help that I just don’t think zombies are scary, especially those of the Romero variety (I love Dawn of the Dead, but I wouldn’t call it a scary movie), and this is more effective as science fiction than as horror.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Nightmare Island” by Theodore Sturgeon
(Cover artist uncredited. Unknown, June 1941.) Who Goes There?
I’ve been itching to cover a Theodore Sturgeon story on here for a long time now, pretty much since I started this site over a year ago. Thing is, if we’re talking strictly short fiction, Sturgeon might be in my top five authors—he’s certainly in my top ten short story writers. He’s most known for his novel More Than Human, because novels have always sold more than short fiction and will continue to do so until the end of time, and while that is a very good novel it doesn’t show the full breadth of his talent. Sturgeon is one of the grand masters of the short story, and this would be true just going by a dozen or so of his very best, never mind the many others. From 1939 until his death in 1985 he stood out as one of the more literary and sentimental voices in the field, not too unlike close contemporary Fritz Leiber. Indeed the two men have a few things in common: they were heavy drinkers, had somewhat hectic love lives, had bouts of either writing a lot or nothing at all, and despite being elegant writers (for their time and place) they never really made it into “the slicks,” despite aspirations.
Sturgeon, despite being most associated with SF, wrote a good deal of horror, especially early in his career. I wanted to go with a story I had not read before and bonus points if it’s a deep cut, which brought me to today’s story. “Nightmare Island” was written during Sturgeon’s first productive period, from 1939 to early 1941; he wrote so much in those three years that he sort of got away with the fact that he wrote not a word of fiction between the summer of 1941 and early 1944. Even though he was only 22 when he wrote this one, he had already gone through several odd jobs while trying to make it as a writer, including a stint as a merchant sailor. Sturgeon’s fiction is sometimes inspired by the various jobs he took on, and “Nightmare Island,” set in the tropics, is about one unfortunate sailor.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1941 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. Sturgeon was so prolific at this point in his career that he used a pseudonym or two, although he couldn’t be bothered to keep that a secret. The much less obscure story “Yesterday Was Monday” appeared in the same issue under Sturgeon’s own name. “Nightmare Island” has been reprinted in English only twice, and never anthologized—a bit of a shame. It appeared in the Sturgeon collection Beyond as well as Microcosmic God, the second volume of his complete short fiction. Yeah, get the latter.
Enhancing Image
We start with a rather vague framing narrative in which we have an unnamed American, here on business, and “the governor,” an older gentleman of some position on the island. We’re in the tropics, maybe the Caribbean, but Sturgeon doesn’t give any real clues as to where we are (aside from a reference to the Panama canal) and maybe that doesn’t matter. Getting one criticism out of the way, I would’ve asked Sturgeon for one more rewrite so as to make the framing device less conspicuous, since this is mostly a first-person narrative from the governor’s perspective and we don’t really need the short buildup between him and the American; hell, why not have the reader take the place of the American and have the governor talk to us directly. It’s short, this opening scene, but it’s a bit clunky. We do, however, get introduced to Barry, our protagonist, who at this point lives as a beachcomber apparently in the governor’s employ. Barry is a bit fucked up and we’re about to find out why, since the conflict of the story has already happened.
We then flash back to when Barry was—well, “normal” is not the right word. Sturgeon’s protagonists can be pretty dysfunctional (think of the misfits at the heart of More Than Human), but even by those standards Barry is a hot mess. His main vice is drinking, like an insane amount of booze. He needs only the flimsiest pretext to indulge his alcoholism. “When he had a job he’d guzzle to celebrate, and when he lost one he’d guzzle to console himself,” as the governor says. At the beginning of the flashback we see Barry getting laid off again, and having been laid off he sees it fit to enter another bout of hard drinking. At a bar one night he has the misfortune of meeting Zilio, a shady character who seems to take pity on him and offers him a punch. “The name did not refer to the ingredients of the drink but to its effect.” Big mistake. I’m not sure if it used to be considered common courtesy to accept a drink a stranger offers or if at some point there was more public awareness of getting roofied and stuff like that.
Getting shanghaied in first-world countries is probably much rarer now than it would’ve been a century ago. With the internet and more ways to identify a person it’d be harder to knock someone out and make them work on some tin can against their will, as happens with Barry. He’s a real sailor, and a union man, but that doesn’t help him much as he’s stuck working on an oil vessel with mostly non-seaman for almost no pay and seemingly no way of jumping ship that wouldn’t spell death. Just when it seems Barry’s luck couldn’t get worse, it does—arguably; it certainly gets stranger, as Barry manages to topple overboard during the night, and while most people would drown, Barry does not. Nay, by taking hold of a piece of driftwood, he survives and even washed ashore on an uninhabited island.
It’s here that the fantastical part of the story comes in, because you may have noticed we’re a good third or so in and nothing strictly out of the ordinary has happened. I’m actually not sure if “Nightmare Island” would count as fantasy or science fiction, since the creatures Barry meets could very well be understood in science-fictional terms (no ghosts or anything like that), but it’s framed as a waking nightmare, one of Barry’s “horrors” resulting from his alcoholism, and it’s never rationalized. Fuck it, calling it fantasy will do the trick. I’m also not sure if Sturgeon had read any William Hope Hodgson, especially The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,” although I seriously doubt he had read Hodgson at this early point. I’m saying this because the bulk of “Nightmare Island” reads like one of Hodgson’s seafaring stories, although it doesn’t read the sheer cosmic unknowability of Hodgson.
But I’m getting ahead of myself slightly.
For most people, getting stranded on a small deserted island would be very bad; but for Barry it’s more of an inconvenience on account of having to make his own booze somehow. A much bigger problem presents itself as Barry has to share the island with giant worms, who are big and have tentacles—and are apparently sentient. Or at least one of them is; again, we’re not given a scientific explanation as to where these things came from or how they work. Encountering such creatures would drive people to insanity, but Barry is already insane, never mind perpetually drunk. This is not cosmic horror, and indeed I’m not sure if it’s possible to write cosmic horror if the protagonist is already unhinged and so not terribly frightened of unearthly horrors. While it is downbeat, the tone and genre of “Nightmare Island” are a bit hard to pin down, which might explain why it has never been anthologized.
Something that is easier to understand is the style Sturgeon employs here, which is conversational, even reminding me of what he did in “Microcosmic God.” Makes sense, as he likely wrote the two stories in very close succession, and as far as other early short stories of his go there’s this recurring sassiness in the style, like someone with a mean sense of humor is telling us a story while huddled around a campfire. In the case of “Nightmare Island” this very much makes sense since a character within the story is telling us what’s happening. Because the governor is not the most succinct of narrators, the story is perhaps a bit longer than it ought to be, but at the same time it doesn’t feel dragged out and it’s easily readable. A lot of the stories Sturgeon wrote for Unknown have a comedic streak, or are straight-up horror, but this is an attempt at serious narrative that’s also not too dour. I’m not even sure I’d call it a horror story, although it is fairly spooky and Barry certainly counts as what we would call a grotesque; he’s an outsider who, for a brief time, finds shelter in the company of worms.
One such work is Ahniroo, who is able to mimic human speech )although how sentient it is is unclear) and who speaks for the other works, who for some reason can’t talk to Barry. Through a misunderstanding (because English is so new to Ahniroo that he doesn’t even know what it is) the the friendly worm ends up calling himself and his kind “nightmares,” hence the title. Barry manages to cooperate with the giant worms and make something of a living for himself on the island, with the omly adversary being “the Big One,” a hostile and especially large worm that resides in a crater. Well, you know what they say, this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, so a confrontation in time for the story’s climax is inevitable.
There Be Spoilers Here
With the help of Ahniroo and some almighty booze he had grown himself (it’s unclear how long he’s on this island for, but it could be a few months), Barry’s able to defeat the Big One, in what might be the only time in his life where he comes out a winner. Normally this would be the end of the story, but because the governor is narrating after the fact and we know from the outset Barry is now a lunatic, we know we won’t get a happy ending. Having been exhausted from his fight with the Big One, Barry passes out on the shore, and by the time he awakes he finds himself on a government ship, a mile or two away from the island already. 99% of people would see getting rescused off a desert island as a good thing, but unfortunately Barry is part of the 1% who would rather not be rescused.
Because he sees a sort of demented nobility in Barry, and because he feels some remorse for “saving” him from maybe the only place where he could feel at home, the governor now keeps watch over our shattered protagonist. It’s tragic in the sort of way that Sturgeon, even almost from the outset of his career, was really good at. We get this nugget of a pasage from the governor as he ruminates on the rescue team finding Barry:
They found him there, dead drunk on the beach. It was quite a puzzle to the shore party. There he was, with no footprints around him to show where he’d come from; and though they scoured the neighborhood of the beach; they found no shelter of anything that might have belonged to him. And when they got him aboard and sobered him up the island was miles astern. He went stark raving mad when he discovered where he was. He wanted to go back to his worms. And he’s been here ever since. He’s no use to anyone. He drinks when he can beg or steal it. He’ll die from it before long, I suppose, but he’s only happy when he’s plastered. Poor devil. I could send him back to his island, I suppose, but— Well, it’s quite a problem. Can I, as the representative of enlightened humanity in this part of the world, allow a fellow human being to go back to a culture of worms?
Whether you consider the ending bittersweet or a total downer depends on whether you believe Barry’s alcoholism is terminal. As someone who has had a couple family members destroy their bodies through heavy drinking, I think Barry gets off fine enough; but still, you can’t blame him for missing his worms. Makes you feel sorry for the bastard.
A Step Farther Out
I’ve read about half the stories Sturgeon wrote for Unknown at this point, which is a fair amount because Sturgeon clearly preferred writing fantasy over SF at that early point. “Shottle Bop,” “It,” and the aforementioned “Yesterday Was Monday” have been reprinted fairly often while “Nightmare Island” has not, and I’m not sure why. It could be that tonally it doesn’t quite land on one end of the spectrum, having not the whimsy of “Yesterday Was Monday” nor the sheer terror of “It.” It’s also not easily classifiable as SF or fantasy so I have to flip a coin on that one. Sturgeon wasn’t so much a genre writer as a writer who saw genre (he wasn’t terribly picky about which one) as a great conduit for expressing his thoughts and fears—and boy can Sturgeon be a little fucking neurotic and boy can he try a little too hard at times. Fine. He’s a fabulous writer, one of the best, and while this is still a very early piece it and the other best stories Sturgeon wrote at this time (especially for Unknown, although we can never forget “Microcosmic God”) showed the first inklings of a master.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Not Our Brother” by Robert Silverberg
(Cover by David White. TZM, July 1982.) Who Goes There?
Given that his career has stretched over half a century, and that he’s still active in fandom, I feel like I shouldn’t have to go much into Robert Silverberg. Author, editor, and fan personality, he’s one of those names that comes up a lot if you’re really getting into the history of the field. He started out in the ’50s and while he was super-prolific early on, it wasn’t until the late ’60s that his writing ascended to another level, earning him several awards in the process. When people talk about Silverberg they often refer to that late ’60s and early ’70s period, when he was at his most intense and experimental, while still being incredibly productive. Arguably his single finest novel, Dying Inside, came out of that fruitful period, and quite shamefully he did not get a Hugo or Nebula out of it.
As revered as Silverberg’s late ’60s/early ’70s period is, I do have a soft spot for ’80s Silverberg—a time when he took a bit of a break from writing novels and focused his passion more on short fiction, seemingly relaxing after the commercial success of Lord Valentine’s Castle. Genre historians don’t pay as much attention to this era of Silverberg, apparently because it’s not as demanding or anguished as his work from a decade prior, but its maturity and often calm self-assuredness is why I like it. “Not Our Brother” is a tale of terror that probably would’ve been more savage had it been written by a younger Silverberg, but it’s still an effective cautionary tale about the parasitic nature of tourism.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1982 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine, which is on the Archive. If you want a source that’s both more readable and legit then good news, “Not Our Brother” was reprinted in Lightspeed, which you can read online for free. So you have no excuse!
Enhancing Image
Halperin is an independently wealthy man (he says at one point he makes money through “real estate,” although it’s unclear if he’s an agent or struck gold on an investment) who is really into collecting masks from exotic cultures. And I mean really into it. He travels to San Simón, a village in Mexico so obscure that Spanish is not even the villagers’ primary language, on the recommendation of Guzmán López, an antiquities dealer who of course shares Haplerin’s fondness for collecting. Guzmán knows the ways of the land and warns Halperin in advance that while the village’s yearly festivities are well worth observing, the village itself is very much not accustomed to outsiders. “Tourists don’t go there,” he says. “The road is terrible and the only hotel is a Cucaracha Hilton—five rooms, straw mattresses.” There is one other thing about the village that Guzmán is not totally upfront about discussing, but the setup is that Halperin is here for a rather unique festival, around the Day of the Dead.
Even for someone who has traveled a fair bit, the trip is still rough going for our hapless protagonist, who up to this point had stayed in more tourist-friendly (i.e., urban) parts of Mexico. To enter San Simón is almost like entering a dark and undiscovered corner of the world—back even to a Mexico that existed in pre-Christian times. “To come out of the pink-and-manicured Disneyland of plush Acapulco into this primitive wilderness was to make a journey five hundred years back in time.” Something Silverberg and I share is our immense fondness for Joseph Conrad, and it’s here that he evokes the metaphorical journey backward in time as written in Heart of Darkness. Now if you’ve read Heart of Darkness then you know it can certainly be problematic, but it’s also an effective and beautifully written anti-colonial tract. “Not Our Brother” smacks of bring written by a privileged white dude, but it’s also clearly working as criticism—possibly even self-criticism—of the affluent white European mindset that the world is your oyster and you’re free to take what you want.
While reading “Not Our Brother” I kept thinking about how indigenous readers would take it, since it reads as anti-colonial but from the colonizer’s perspective. No doubt in an ideal world such a story about a hidden part of Mexico would be written by a Mexican author, but this was 1982 and what the hell, Jews like Silverberg weren’t even considered “proper” white until a ways into the 20th century. You take what you can get. What makes things more difficult is that while the narration is in third-person, it sort of bleeds into Halperin’s thoughts, or maybe it’s the other way around. When Halperin enters the village and struggles to get even a word out of the locals he at one point thinks of them as “alien as Martians.” Then he corrects himself and considers that in this scenario he would be the Martian—a stranger who has come to Earth, but not bearing gifts. Halperin’s xenophobia is a character flaw, but it’s downplayed and not given as much attention as what turns out to be a kleptomania problem.
Sorry, I’m getting distracted slightly.
Getting used to this village seems like a lost cause, but then suddenly we’re introduced to Ellen Chambers, a fellow tourist. “She was about thirty, with close-cut dark hair and bright, alert eyes, attractive, obviously American,” so the narrator tells us, which is true enough; a Canadian would never have snuck up on Halperin like that. Ellen says the villagers aren’t hostile so much as shy around outsiders, since they come by so rarely. What are the odds then that there would be two Americans in this middle-of-nowhere part of the world? Indeed what are the odds. Halperin is a bit of a fool but he’s not totally blind, as he can sense that there’s something unusual about Ellen, thought he can’t put his finger on it. Like your typical horror protagonist, Halperin is a materialist who believes he lives in a world that is essentially godless and devoid of supernatural shenanigans. I myself am an atheist and you, the reader, are probably more or less in the same boat in the sense that you probably don’t believe in ghosts or demons or anything like that. Yet it’s funny: when we read tales of the supernatural we suddenly become god-fearing people—superstitious without skipping a beat. We can infer that something is wrong with Ellen by her behavior and by how inexplicable her appearance is; the difference between us and the schmuck we’re following is that we know we’re reading fiction.
Halperin’s hesitancy around Ellen that he can barely articulate will ultimately save him, but he’s also too unaware that he’s inside a horror story teo take in all the red flags. For one he should really consider the consequences of stealing decorative masks from the hotel. The funny thing about “Not Our Brother” is that the big reveal is so blatantly telegraphed (to the point where it’s impossible for me to not allude to it, even now) that we start to think the thing with Ellen might be a red herring, and thus we look toward the masks as harbingers of doom. We don’t know if the masks are cursed or what, but Halperin has to try to pretty hard to not, say, steal one of these things from his hotel room. Luckily he has a case of conscience. “He was a collector, not a thief. But these masks were gorgeous.” Silverberg rather implicitly is asking us: What’s the difference between a collector and a thief? Is it ever right to take cultural artifacts and put them in some museum hundreds or thousands of miles away, especially without the owner’s knowledge? Taking one of the masks home as a “souvenir” is a bad idea morally, but because we know we’re dealing with a world that involves vengeful or devious spirits that adds another layer to the tension.
The night of the village festival is approaching, and Guzmán tells our hapless protagonist about “amo tokinwan,” spirits who, depending on their mood, can be either benevolent or mischievous—or worse. These spirits are rather ghoulish, and can take on the form of people for one reason or another, during festivities. We of course expect one of these spirits to show up, assuming one hasn’t already appeared already, but most likely hidden under one of many elaborate masks. Amo tokinwan means “not our brother” in Nahuatl, and it not being Spanish (Nahuatl being the villagers’ primary language) only reinforces the notion that these customs are rooted in something that might be even older than Christianity. I’m not sure how much research Silverberg put into this story and I’m not even slightly an expert on this part of the world, so unfortunately I sort of have to take his work for it. If someone who is accustomed to rural parts of Mexico could hit me up and tell me if Silverberg is full of shit, that’d be cool. But now we’re getting to the climax, and just in time!
There Be Spoilers Here
That Ellen is one of these spirits does not come as a surprise; even the cover for this issue of Twilight Zone Magazine alludes to Ellen’s true nature, with her face being iolated and weirdly artificial-looking as if it were a mask. Which in a sense it is. Ellen’s human form is but a mirage, which Halperin finds out almost too late. The reveal is super-predictable, which is my big criticism of this story and something which stopped me from getting too into it, but it does make ironic sense. Of course the one person who presents a threat to Halperin is someone who doesn’t look like she’s one of the natives; that Halperin takes shelter in the one fellow tourist makes his near-death experience with her almost read as karmic. Lucky for him that he merely get into some hot foreplay because Ellen can really have her way with him (and it is both an erotically charged and hallucinatory scene), as Guzmán and a few villagers arrive just in time to scare off the spirit. Apparently the spirit had sucked out the soul of some American woman who had come to the village before and taken on her likeness.
The ending can almost read like an anti-climax given Halperin comes out of it fine, but it’s also made clear that his brush with the supernatural traumatized him and, perhaps, taught him to not tread where he doesn’t belong. “He buys only through galleries and does not travel much any more,” so the narrator tells us at the very end. I’m sure Silverberg considered killing off Halperin at the end, and had he written the story a decade earlier he probably would’ve gone that route; but that would’ve been even more predictable than what we got. Silverberg is not naturally a horror writer and so “Not Our Brother” reads at times more like a science-fictional anthropological study that one would expect from Ursula Le Guin or Chad Oliver. It’s a short novelette of just over 8,000 words, but Silverberg’s descriptions can be so long-winded and yet so readable that it feels a couple thousand words shorter than that.
A Step Farther Out
Is it scary? Not really. Like I said, Silverberg is not by nature a writer of spooky stories, which makes “Not Our Brother” seem more like testing new ground than a master practicing his craft. On top of the possible racism (I don’t think the story is racist, but it could be reasonably construed as that) there is a bit of misogyny thrown in, which—believe it or not, Silverberg used to be worse about that sort of thing. Go back and read his late ’60s/early ’70s material and you’ll notice a toxic mix of male chauvinism and a recurring distrust of women. The Silverberg of the ’80s that I’ve read is better about dealing with things like race and the relationship between men and woman, but that might be simply a product of Silverberg coming into respectable middle age. Yet it must be said that while “Not Our Brother” is unlikely to impress us, especially those well-acquainted with spooky shit, it’s a very readable and thoughtful work.
See you next time.
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Things Beyond: October 2023
(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.) Let me tell you about monsters.
I love monsters of all sizes, although I have to admit I tend to prefer the giants that stalk whole landscapes. The bigger the better, but then “bigger” doesn’t always mean physical size. I love Frankenstein’s monster, especially Boris Karloff’s mildly talkative and rather emo depiction in Bride of Frankenstein, with his hungering for both love and death. I love Max Schreck’s Count Orlock in Nosferatu, who despite being modeled on Dracula seems to be almost more rat than man. I love the blob, especially in the 1988 version of The Blob—a mindless eating machine that digests people while they’re still alive. I love Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, King Ghidorah, and even Hedorah, the walking turd that might be the strangest of Godzilla’s foes. I love the zombies of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, the shambling corpses who walk the earth in search of something they can’t put a rotted finger on. I think the creature from the black lagoon deserves a break (which he finally gets in The Shape of Water, a Best Picture winner!) and I think werewolves are SEXY.
Fantastical horror always involves monsters, even if they’re the theoretical ghosts of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. As such the stories I pick for review every October (and it will be every October for the foreseeable future) always seem to be monster tales at their core. It’ll be Halloween soon and we’re putting up the decorations. We’ll be seeing vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, witches, black cats, and things from beyond that cannot be easily classified. Because I believe horror, more than any other genre, benefits from brevity, we’ll be doing all shorts again. These are rapid-fire terrors that hopefully will ignite the imagination.
We have the usual suspects: Weird Tales, Twilight Zone Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Certain outlets have served as safe havens for short horror fiction through the decades, and admittedly I would feel weird if I were to not include a selection from something as foundational as Weird Tales. Some traditions ought to be respected.
Here are the stories:
- “Not Our Brother” by Robert Silverberg. From the July 1982 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. We’re starting with someone who probably doesn’t come to mind when one thinks of horror, although Silverberg’s work can sometimes evoke existential dread. Having made his debut in the early ’50s and still active in fandom, Silverberg has had one of the longest careers of any writer—inside or outside the field. This is a rare example of him doing straight terror.
- “Nightmare Island” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the June 1941 issue of Unknown. I consider Sturgeon one of the finest short story writers of the 20th century, and a major inspiration. Without Sturgeon and those like him this site probably wouldn’t exist. While most associated with SF, Sturgeon wrote a good deal of horror, including the stories “Bianca’s Hands,” “Bright Segment,” and the novel Some of Your Blood. This one is from very early in Sturgeon’s career.
- “The Naturalist” by Maureen F. McHugh. From the Spring 2010 issue of Subterranean Online. McHugh won a Hugo for her alternate history story “The Lincoln Train,” and her debut novel China Mountain Zhang is one of the cult classics of ’90s SF; but her range goes well beyond alternate history as she has proven herself to be quite versatile over the last 35 years. “The Naturalist” looks to be a rare horror turn from McHugh, having to do with zombies.
- “The Ancient Mind at Work” by Suzee McKee Charnas. From the February 1979 issue of Omni. I had a bad first experience with Charnas a couple years ago, but have been meaning to give her another shot since her reputation is solid and her devotion to the weird is unquestioned. “The Ancient Mind at Work” was Charnas’s first short story, although she already had two novels in print. It would then be absorbed into the fix-up novel The Vampire Tapestry.
- “Pipeline to Pluto” by Murray Leinster. From the August 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Here we have another surprising inclusion, given Leinster isn’t normally associated with horror. He first started writing genre fiction in 1919, predating even Weird Tales. What’s surprising is that not only did he stay relevant several decades into his career, but he peaked in the ’40s and ’50s, holding his ground against writers a generation younger than him.
- “Brenda” by Margaret St. Clair. From the March 1954 issue of Weird Tales. I covere St. Clair only a few monthss ago, but she’s back already. She wrote a lot in a relatively short span of time (mostly from the late ’40s to the late ’50s), and during that time she was arguably one of the best short story wrriters in the field. Not one to be tied down to any single genre, or even any mode of writing, St. Clair swerved effortlessly between pulpy and more refined prose.
- “Jedella Ghost” by Tanith Lee. From the September 1998 issue of Interzone. One of two returning authors from last October, because honestly I wanna taste more of what Lee has to offer before forming a real opinion; that and she’s such a prolific and consistently spooky writer that her well never runs dry. I’ve read one or two of her stories since our last encounter (which admittedly did not enthuse me) and I think I’m starting to get what her deal is.
- “The Door to Saturn” by Clark Ashton Smith. From the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales. The other returning author from last year’s Spooktacular, and this time it’s because I do love me some Clark Ashton Smith. While he can sometimes phone it in, Smith’s writing is often vibrant, poetic, and deeply enchanting—like a wizard casting a spell. Here we have a story set in his Hyperboria universe, a land where sorcerers and dark gods are in charge.
- “The Last Feast of Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti. From the April 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. We’re ending with what has to be the longest story of the bunch, but it’s by one of those rare modern masters of horror. Ligotti is not the most popular writer in his field, but those who read him hold him in the highest regard. A devout student of Lovecraft, Ligotti’s fiction can be disturbing by way of implication, as opposed to violence.
Won’t you read with me?
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Serial Review: The Chronicler by A. E. van Vogt (Part 2/2)
(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, November 1946.) The Story So Far
Michael Slade is a strapping young businessman who would’ve continued to enjoy a normal and luxurious life if not for a car accident that revealed a third eye lurking in his forehead. Using a dubious method of eye therapy, Slade is able to perceive a plane of existence totally separate from and yet existing in tandem with Earth as we recognize it. He meets a fellow three-eyed person, a mysterious woman named Leear who guides him (rather obtusely) toward a city of this new plane: Naze. A city perpetually under siege and whose denizens have a concerning appetite for human blood, Naze is controlled by a man named Geean, who, so Leear claims, must be killed if the city is to be saved at all. Outside the city lurks a group of people who dwell in caves and who seem to be connected with Leear, having come from a crashed ship and who show themselves to be more civilized than the city-dwellers. This is all well and good, but Slade isn’t sure what his role in all this is, and unfortunately for him he’s in an A. E. van Vogt story.
That’s the gist, but there are so many odd little things that happened in the first installment that the recap section reads like a somewhat inebriated person trying to summarize a Thomas Pynchon novel. Van Vogt crams a lot into those thirty pages, and if you think the next thirty-something pages are gonna be any clearer—I’m sorry.
Enhancing Image
I had to take a Tylenol for this.
Like last time I won’t be talking about the plot so much as things taken almost in isolation that stuck out to me, because while I don’t claim to be a master at reading comprehension, I can’t bring myself to understand all of what happens here; more damningly, I can’t bring myself to care enough. The Chronicler is a turkey in a way that bad van Vogt stories specifically tend to be turkeys, which is to say they’re bad in such a way as to be unique to van Vogt’s own failings as a writer. It’s like how latter day Heinlein can be bad in ways that only latter day Heinlein can be bad: the digressions, the lack of plotting, the very odd sexual remarks, and so on. In the case of van Vogt it’s an incoherence of plotting which other writers might only reach if trying to write a van Vogt pastiche. It’s funny because in the anthology Five Science Fiction Novels (ed. Martin Greenberg) I had read and reviewed another inclusion in that book: Fritz Leiber’s Destiny Times Three. I remarked in my review that Leiber almost certainly intended to write a van Vogt pastiche there, and the sad part is that when compared with The Chronicler Leiber beats van Vogt at his own game—not that Destiny Times Three is a masterpiece or anything, just the better narrative.
The first ten pages or so of The Chronicler‘s second installment made me think that maybe things won’t be so bad. Slade, after being saved from the depths of Naze, meets the cave people and this time tries to get to know them. It turns out that these people are not only civilized but have psychic powers beyond even what Slade can do—for now. He falls under the wing of Danbar and Malenkens, who know what Leear is up to but refuse to give Slade more than a little breadcrumb of information, since Leear has plans of her own. The idea is that the eye therapy (which doesn’t work IRL) which allowed Slade to perceive this other plane was only the beginning of what will turn out to be arduous psychic training. As an example, the cave people can turn themselves invisible—or rather mess with other people’s vision so as to make them think they’ve turned invisible. Technology doesn’t much play much of a part in this narrative, as the powers that the characters have are pretty much all psychic—powers that are already dormant, like the third eye, only needing to be awakened via training.
ESP is the flavor of the week, in the case of Astounding/Analog the flavor of, hmmm, some forty years and change. We’re introduced to the niths, one of which we had seen towards the end of the first installment but whose roles are now made more clear: bear-like creatures that are not only sentient but telepathic, opening two-way channels with those they communicate with. Telepathy is not predominant in The Chronicler as some other typical Astounding works, if only because van Vogt turns up the dial so high on ESP generally here that telepathy comes almost as an afterthought. The thing about the predominance of ESP is Astounding/Analog is that most authors used it either as a storytelling tool (nothing inherently wrong with that) or to spice up their piece for Campbell. James Blish tore apart his own serial Get Out of My Sky (under a pseudonym) for cynically incorporating ESP in the back end of that story, which I’m sure will be amusing when we eventually get to that. But van Vogt was one of the few writers in Campbell’s stable who was a true believer—with tragic consequences.
Okay, so. Van Vogt’s writing philosophy was that on average you should scenes of about 800 words and that with each scene there should be at least one plot development. Sounds simple. The result is often that van Vogt’s stories pack a lot of plot into relatively little space, such that even a short-short like “The Great Judge” is just a bit more action-packed and twisty than you would expect. Sometimes this works beautifully; sometimes you get a bunch of shit that fails to cohere. The Chronicler packs a short novel’s worth of plot into a 30,000-word novella and while it could’ve worked if van Vogt was a more elegant writer, elegance is not something he’s known for. People, when taking down van Vogt, say his prose is rather stilted, almost like it was written by someone whose first language is not English. This is true enough, although he can be surprisingly evocative at times, almost in spite of himself, and there are a few scenes in the back half of The Chronicler that work—that are memorable in a good way. There’s a late scene where Slade has a telepathic conversation with a friendly nith that is strongly dreamlike, evoking what Joseph Conrad calls “the dream-sensation,” that struck me as a rare moment here of van Vogt being on the ball.
But holy shit, I’m tired and I could no longer afford to care by the end. It doesn’t help that the climax of this story is extremely confusing, even by the “high” standard it set for itself. We’re given a series of revelatios about Leear and Geean and how they have a shared history, even being part of the same race of immortals (makes sense, given their names are similar). It all has something to do with life-prolonging technology being tossed aside in favor of true immortality achieved with—you guessed it—ESP. There are a couple major twists brought up in, I kid you not, the last couple pages that raise so many needless questions that my head hurt a bit. I wasn’t convinced van Vogt was being 2 smart 4 me so much van Vogt writing something that only made sense to himself. I can see why this hasn’t been printed in English since the ’70s: it’s not very good. It’s the kind of bad that doesn’t offend me but rather deeply weary me; it’s the kind of bad that makes me feel like I’m coming down with a cold, or the flu, and that I ought to take a nap. Sleep is always good, so I suppose you could do much worse.
A Step Farther Out
What’s funny is that I could’ve avoided this—or delayed the inevitable, since given the finite number of serials I would’ve had to cover The Chronicler at some point; but I had read a van Vogt piece a few days before my monthly forecast post with the intention of writing about it, and it was a much stronger piece than this. “Dormant” is a short story I would recommend to anyone curious about post-nuclear SF in the years immediately following World War II, as it’s entertaining, evocative, a little unhinged, and yet coherent for van Vogt. Problem was, too much time had passed between my reading the story and when I was set to write about it. I got cold feet. My metaphorical pen started to run out of ink. There’s much to say about “Dormant,” but I may save it for when I’ll have reread it in a few years, presumably when my thoughts will be more fully formed. Please read that one instead. To quote a letter in the March 1947 issue of Astounding, The Chronicler is “not up to van Vogt’s standards.”
See you next time.
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Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 