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Novella Review: “Green Days in Brunei” by Bruce Sterling
(Cover by J. K. Potter. Asimov’s, October 1985.) Who Goes There?
When you think of cyberpunk the first author to come to mind is almost certainly William Gibson, who didn’t invent the subgenre but very much codified it with Neuromancer; after that it becomes a bit of a free-for-all. Cyberpunk goes back to the ’70s, before Gibson started writing in earnest, and you can even see inklings of it in the late ’60s, perhaps most profoundly in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which both have cyberpunk-y elements. But as far as the heyday of cyberpunk goes the author maybe most cited who is not Gibson would be Bruce Sterling—despite the fact that much of what Sterling has written has not been cyberpunk. It could be that Sterling is not as popular as he should be because he’s such a versatile writer, covering seemingly every subgenre under the sun and even ssometimess venturing into fantasy, all while retaining a certain attitude you’d expect from someone who grew up in Austin. He’s a bit of a punk like that.
1985 was a pretty good year for Sterling that also showed off his range, with the vicious short story “Dinner in Audoghast” (alternate history), probably his most popular novel with Schismatrix (space opera), and today’s story, which is………. arguably cyberpunk. “Green Days in Brunei” has a few hallmarks of the subgenre but would nowadays be more likely classified as solarpunk than straight cyberpunk. The “green” of the title refers to money but also green energy. I’ve been on a streak with the past few novellas I’ve covered (not counting serials) and the streak continues here, as this story is pretty cool. It has naught but the skeleton of a plot but it’s a story that much more hinges on characters and speculations about the future.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October 1985 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. I actually have a physical copy of this issue, but it’s easier to copy lines of text off a PDF. I ended up with six pages of “notes” for the damn thing, because Sterling packs a lot into this novella. It was then reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection, which unlike a few of the other early volumes you can find for reasonable pricess online. (Don’t try to collect the first volume unless you have money to burn.) It was later reprinted in the Sterling collections Crystal Express and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling.
Enhancing Image
Turner Choi is a Chinese-Canadian twenty-something working officially as an engineer in what is set to be a robot shipyard in Brunei, a very small country on the island of Borneo; unofficially he’s also a computer hacker, although given the limited means he’s not able to do anything fancy. The shipyard in question is supposed to become fully automated, bringing industry back to Brunei with minimal human labor. Brunei is smaller than a lot of American cities, with Brunei Town itself housing only a hundred thousand people, with basically nothing to indicate it as standing in the 21st century. “No cars. No airport. No television.” It’s circa 2020 and a second oil crisis in the ’90s sucked out what little industry the country had before. Now it’s kept afloat with a very small pocket of money—an aristocracy that can almost fit on the head of a pin.
Said aristocracy, however, made a deal with Kyocera, a Japanese corporation (it’s not the ’80s if the Japanese aren’t depicted as economic juggernauts), and that’s where Turner comes in. It’s Turner’s first big job and it might be the toughest he’ll ever deal with, as he and his crew are basically expected to turn shit into sugar. The robot factory for the shipyard is condemned and has been untouched for two decades. This would not be such a problem if not for Brunei’s lacking in metals, never mind that Turner has to do some hacking on the sly to access what we might now call the internet—although here it’s basically just email and chat rooms. His Bruneian contact is also someone not easy to get along with—that being Jimmy Brooke, a former British rockstar, a “deaf, white-haired eccentric,” who came to Brunei years ago and never left. Brooke is curious, as for one he’s the only white character of importance in the narrative, but we’ll elaborate on him later.
There are only a few main characters, the last of these being Seria, a young woman who piggybacks off Brooke’s antics and who is, as it turns out, the sultan’s (rebellious) daughter. Turner hits on Seria one night and it does not occur to him fast enough that getting in with a literal princess might not be the best idea. In terms of personality Seria might be the best character, despite only existing in relation to the men in her life, including Turner, Brooke, her brother (who is mostly offscreen), and her rich dad (who is kept entirely offscreen). Turner and Seria hit it off despite the former looking a little ridiculous with his lumberjack jacket and knee-high boots that his mom bought for him. If not for his Chinese heritage, Turner would look like the typical white Canadian, perpetually gloomy from having lived in Vancouver—which hey, at least it’s not Toronto. In fairness to Turner, his personal life before coming to Brunei was a bit of a mess.
Where to start?
The shadow hanging over Turner throughout the story, aside from the stress of satisfying his employer, is the fact that he and his brother Georgie are kin to a real bastard: Grandpa Choi, now elderly but who back in the ’70s gained infamy as a corrupt cop in Hong Kong. The combined financial success and public scandal of Grandpa Choi seemed to have disastrous results for Turner’s dad, who sank into alcoholism and met an untimely death prior to the story’s beginning. We also find out that Turner’s old college girlfriend (having been separated for a few years now) is a barely functioning drug addict, and the one time we get an interaction between them is pretty uncomfortable. Turner is a classic rebellious hero, especially in the context of cyberpunk, being a romantic who is also trying to escape his past. The little computer shenanigans we see are framed romantically, both in how Turner’s l33t haxing powers are romanticized and how the romance between Turner and Seria is intensified through online messaging.
Something that caught my eye was how Sterling seemed to understand, even in this early period, how online messaging affects relationships differently from in-person talking, be they romantic or otherwise. When communicating via text you open a door to your inner consciousness that would normally be closed when talking with your mouth. Get a load of this passage describing the escalation of Turner’s relationship with Seria and how their texting only heightens their sense of intimacy:
Turner realized now that no woman had ever known and understood him as Seria did, for the simple reason that he had never had to talk to one so much. If things had gone as they were meant to in the West, he thought, they would have chased their attraction into bed and killed it there. Their two worlds would have collided bruisingly, and they would have smiled over the orange juice next morning and mumbled tactful goodbyes.
I need to read up more on what would’ve been computer culture when it was in its infancy. Sterling is known for his fiction, but he has also written extensively on the history of computing and the hacker subculture that spawned from it. 1985 sounds almost impossibly old for discussing such a topic, but remember that Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroess of the Computer Revolution was published in 1984 and Sterling certainly would have known about it. One of the few quibbles I have with “Green Days in Brunei” is that it falls for what was then the common trap of framing hackers as heroic, noble figures—a pill that would be harder to swallow nowadays. While Turner is written as flawed, with his pride certainly getting in the way, Sterling doesn’t question the nobility of his illicit hacking in contrast with the shadowy bureaucracy of the Bruneian government. That Turner’s antics ultimately do much good might stretch the modern reader’s suspension of disbelief, but then its optimism is overall well-founded.
Turner has fallen in love, which dramatic purposes usually is something that results in disaster—or at the very least conflict. Which it does, as it should. It started as a job he would do before returning to Canada, but now he has a reason to stay in Brunei; mind you, it won’t be the only reason. Sterling makes the most of tropes that nowadays might read as predictable, even going to some lengths to justify the contrivances in the plot. Turner and Seria meeting is highly unlikely, sure, but given the small population it’s not as unlikely as if they were to meet in New York. Even the laughably outdated technology is justified by the fact that Brunei is a backwater, both from lack of industry and deliberate political choices. The Green Party (no, not that one), while kneecapped by the aristocracy, has worked to turn the country into almost one big greenhouse.
Turner, Seria, Brooke, and later Dr. Moratuwa (more on him in a minute) fit into archetypes that will be familiar to cyberpunk fans, but who are elevated above their archetypes through some pretty sharp dialogue. Would “Green Days in Brunei” have benefited from being written by a Chinese or Malaysian author? Maybe. The problem is that Sterling manages to be (somehow) both idiosyncratic and a bit of a chameleon. You can discern a Sterling story by how it’s written, but his willingness to tackle different zones of interest with ease makes it so that while you can try to emulate Sterling’s style, you would be hard-pressed to actually pull it off. I would would say the novella shows its age, given how easy it is to indulge in exoticism with former colonies (this is, after all, a post-colonial narrative), Sterling manages to be sensitive and forward-looking enough that it doesn’t read as exploitative; rather it reads as coming from someone early enough in their career that they’ve honed their skills and have not yet turned reactionary.
There Be Spoilers Here
Despite his appearance and rock-and-roll lifestyle, Brooke knows more about the workings of Brunei than he lets on—even saving Turning when the latter stumbles upon a political prison. It’s here that we meet Dr. Moratuwa, a decrepit former activist who still has some fighting spirit in him; being a devout Buddhist probably helps. It’s also here that we find out the true purpose of the robot shipyard, which is to construct primitive but robust rowboats that can cross the seas without need for electricity. In a way, although Turner’s employer isn’t aware of it, the purpose of the robot shipyard is to bring back the age of sailing—using modern technology to produce ships that are made of simple materials and which anyone with at least one arm can work. And the plan will work, so long as Turner does his job.
But then a wrench gets thrown into the whole thing: Grandpa Choi is on his deathbed. Not that Turner and Georgie have any love for the old man, and indeed in the one scene where Grandpa Choi talks she shows himself to be a real asshole, but it’s during this argument between Turner and his elder that Grandpa Choi, in a moment of devilish joy, reveals that Turner is set to inherit the old man’s considerable (and blood-drenched) fortune. Our romantic leads have now both come to a crossroads, wherein Turner wants to abandon his inheritance and Seria wants to give up her title. The rich suffering a case of conscience and giving up their wealth for the good of the world is a major point here, even given metaphysical significance when Moratuwa says, “Buddha was a prince also, but he left his palace when the world called out.” If only the rich in the real world were capable of feeling remorse or empathy. It thematically ties things together, but our leads’ decision to abandon their wealth in favor of the Green movement is probably not a conclusion a more jaded writer would read—which doesn’t stop the ending from feeling genuinely triumphant.
Sterling makes a few points by way of characters clearly speaking for him, and if I were to go over then one by one we would be here all day. This is a tightly packed narrative that feasibly could’ve been expanded into a novel (add a couple subplots and you’re set), but I much prefer single-minded works like this that are easier to reread. No doubt I’ll only enjoy it more when I eventually get around to it a second time.
A Step Farther Out
I’m not sure if the ending rings as true now as it did back then; at the same time, with the growing prominence of hopeful SF (specifically narratives which speculate on alternatives to capitalism in the future), said optimism may be prescient. I don’t know if the Sterling of today would’ve written this story, because it strikes me as being written by someone who wasn’t much older than the main characters, and who hadn’t yet been broken down by the harsh reality of genre publishing—never mind that it was written before the horrific consequences of the Reagan years fully sank in. “Green Days in Brunei” reads more like a reaction to the oil crisis of the ’70s than the austerity politics of the ’80s, but its attempt to reconcile modern technology with green energy is admirable. It helps that this is about as sincere as Sterling gets, rivaling only that great “romantic gesture” of his, “Dori Bangs,” which might still be my favorite.
See you next time.
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Serial Review: The Chronicler by A. E. van Vogt (Part 1/2)
(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, October 1946.) Who Goes There?
It’s not unusual for authors who’ve made it to see their popularity dwindle within their lifetimes, but A. E. van Vogt’s fall from grace is a little weirder and more complicated than average. In the ’40s he was one of the most popular writerss in magazine SFF, easily rivaling Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—until, almost overnight, he wasn’t. Van Vogt debuted in 1939 and wrote a mile a minute until 1951, whereupon he gave up writing fiction from whole cloth in favor of taking the many stories he had already written and stitching them into fix-up novels. This change in work ethic happened, at least in part, because van Vogt got really busy shilling a new pseudoscience that you may have heard of: Dianetics. While he didn’t join the Church of Scientology, van Vogt shilled Dianetics for little over a decade, and by the time he gave up that business and got back to writing in earnest he had lost his prestige—although he still had his fans.
On top of the Dianetics business, van Vogt saw some pretty biting criticism during his heyday, most famously from a young Damon Knight who tore apart the serial version of The World of Null-A. When van Vogt returned in the ’60s his work was not up to the standard of prior material, such that it became easy to assume that van Vogt was never good. It’s a shame, because van Vogt’s best stories are pretty special, with nuggets like “Far Centaurus,” “Enchanted Village,” “The Weapon Shop,” “The Rull,” “The Great Judge,” and of course the stories making up The Voyage of the Space Beagle being well worth reading today. The Chronicler, also reprinted as Siege of the Unseen, does not look to be one of van Vogt’s finer moments, although it’s still far too strange an endeavor to be considered dull.
Placing Coordinates
Serialized in the October and November 1946 issues of Astounding Science Fiction, which can be found here and here. The Chronicler has only been reprinted a few times in English and you’re more likely to find it as Siege of the Unseen. It was first reprinted under its original title as part of Five Science Fiction Novels (ed. Martin Greenberg) and then as one half of an Ace Double in 1959—the other half being John Brunner’s The World Swappers. It has not seen print since the ’70s (in English, that is, since apparently the French love van Vogt) and there may be a reason for that.
Enhancing Image
Normally I would try to do a point-by-point synopsis, but the plot for The Chronicler is nigh undiscernible and so for the sake of my own sanity I’ll be instead focusing on scenes and ideas that caught my attention—for better or worse. A common criticism of van Vogt is that his stories make no sense, and while this is sometimes not the case (the aforementioned “Enchanted Village” and “The Great Judge” have straightforward narratives), it is very much true here. This thing makes no sense. There are some pretty memorable scenes and if van Vogt has a major talent it’s for crafting moments like these, but stringing them together is a different story.
So…
Michael Slade is co-head of a brokerage firm who survives a car accident with his wife at the beginning of the story. He gets cut pretty badly on his forehead, but the injury is nothing compared to what lies under the skin: a third eyeball, lidless but otherwise functional, which hitherto had been dormant since it couldn’t see anything. It’s suggested that the third eye has to do with the pineal gland, which if you’ve read some really old-timey SF (for example, Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”) then you might be familiar with it as a trope. We’re literally two pages in and we’re already being introduced to some Cronenberg-esque body horror and pseudoscience that would’ve been old hat even in 1946. Slade always knew his forehead was soft (something that really should’ve concerned him more than it does), but he didn’t know he had a dormant third eye hiding in there.
But wait, there’s more!
Slade, whose vision in his two normal eyes is poor and in his third eye very bad, goes to see an eye doctor who suggests an alternative method for restoring his eyesight. The doctor is a quack, although he’s framed as perfectly legit in-story, and I’m bringing this up being he employs an actual eye correction method that van Vogt may or may not have also bought into: the Bates method. Named after William Horatio Bates, this is a “theory” that proposes that poor eyesight comes not from something wrong with the eye itself, but with how the brain functions. The idea is that someone will basically go through therapy and relax their mental state such that they’re able to see more clearly, foregoing surgery and prescription glasses. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but the Bates method has long since been discredited and it was likely already considered bunk by most eye doctors even when van Vogt was writing this story.
Using a method that doesn’t work, Slade is able to not only to improve his eyesight but see things with his third eye that he normally should not be able to, even being seemingly transported to a different location from where he was a second ago. It’s during one of these sessions that Slade finds himelf by a stream, in a place he’s never been before, and he sees a woman who looks like she’s about go skinny dipping, as “except for a rather ornamental silvery belt around her waist, she had no clothes on.” This is an unexpectedly titillating scene, given it was printed in Astounding, but more importantly, Slade and this woman (let’s call her Leear) have a short interaction. The thing that really catches Slade’s attention, aside from the view, is that Leear also has a third eye. What could this mean?
Before I get into what will be the main setting, let’s talk about pseudoscience, as it’s a word that’s come up a few times now. Pseudoscience, which is really an umbrella term that can cover anything from ESP to UFOs to alternatives to Darwinian evolution, has historically played a major part in the conceiving of science fiction—which creates a problem. For decades SF fans and writers have prided themselves on keeping up to date with the latest scientific findings, but if you check the facts you’ll find this rarely the case; and even then, science goes through far more changes than myth. Some writers intentionally fall back on speculations that held water decades ago but have since then been disproved, writing what we’d call recursive SF to achieve a retrograde effect. Nobody with sense would seriously object to someone writing a story set on a swampy Venus in 2023.
The problem is that outdated science is not quite the same thing as pseudoscience—i.e., as fake science, i.e., once more, as science that, when asked for evidence and consistency, fails the test. ESP is fake science. Dianetics is fake science. The Dean Drive is fake science. The Bates method is fake science. Despite John W. Campbell’s proclaiming that Astounding (and later Analog) would print fiction based in real science (or at least credible speculation), the magazine would oftentimes print fiction that takes advantages of fake science, and it would become such a habit that it would persist even after Campbell’s death. One of the differences between Heinlein and van Vogt is that while Heinlein was masterful at incorporating real (for the time) science, van Vogt was equally masterful at incorporating fake science. The result is that van Vogt’s premises are often patently absurd, as is the case with The Chronicler.
One more thing to bring up before we get to “the other plane,” which is that this story swaps back and forth between in-the-moment third-person narration and a series of recorded interviews with different characters that presumably happen after the story ends; saying “presumably” because Slade has apparently died. According to Slade’s wife (or ex-wife, as she leaves him during the eye therapy ordeal), the quack doctor, and a few other people, Slade ATE SHIT, and yet in the third-person half of the narrative he is very much alive. This is an unusual method of creating intrigue and I have to give van Vogt kudos for trying, but I have to think it would also be more effective if I could understand what was happening.
Upon returning to his old family estate outside the city where he normally lives, Slade follows through on a deal made with Leear—that he is to meet her on this farm at midnight on any given day. It works, and through means which not even the omniscient narrator is able to explain, Slade gets spirited away to “the other plane”—a place not so much on a different planet as in another dimension existing in tandem with Earth, thanks to his third eye. It’s here that we’re moved into the city of Naze, a massive shithole which is perpetually under siege and which is host to thousands of… and this is really the best way I can put it… non-supernatural vampires. People who have a bit of an addiction to human blood, much like how we might have an addiction to cocaine or jerking off. The city is home to savages while Leear and her people are civilized folks who live in caves because their spaceship has been put out of commission. Nice little reversal there, huh? The civilized live like barbarians while the barbarians live in the city.
Slade jumps back and forth a few times between Naze and Earth, but mostly he sticks to Naze, and perhaps too quickly he comes to the conclusion that he’s likely to stay here in spite of everything. Slade’s mindsert makes sense to a degree, since he is a three-eyed freak who’s now getting divorced and whose friends won’t return his calls. Something that keps popping into my head while reading this installment, aside from “WHAT THE FUCK’S GOING ON?,” is the possibility that van Vogt had been rereading the John Carter novels at the time. The Chronicler, in some ways, certainly echoes A Princess of Mars. While John Carter astral projects himself to Barsoom (itself a hard pill to swallow nowadays), Slade has more esoteric ways of shifting between the dimensions. Romance also comes up unusually quickly, although I’m not sure if it’s weirder to crush on a female alien who mostly look human but lays eggs or a three-eyed crackhead vampire.
There Be Spoilers Here
It’s hard to spoil something you barely comprehend.
Let me put it another way. This installment of The Chronicler is pretty short, being only thirty pages. Looking at both installments I would say it comes to maybe about 30,000 words—honestly short enough to have been published in one piece as a novella, except there was probably an issue with scheduling and Campbell needed a serial. Despite being objectively short, and despite not being boring (it has other issues, but not that one), reading it can feel like an endurance test. The worst part is that van Vogt crams so much plot development in here, and so little of it connects, that you’d be tempted to read the recap section of the second installment right away just to see what you might’ve missed. Like I said, while there are scenes that work (I’m thinking of a very odd bit wherein Slade considers hitting on Amor, a city dweller and ally to Leear, only for her to ask him if she could have a little taste of his blood), the dots do not connect.
I have many questions and I suspect only some of them will be answered in the next installment. Van Vogt has this thing for flashbanging the reader with an enigma or unexplained revelation at the last minute, which sometimes works, but not so much here.
A Step Farther Out
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” by William F. Wu
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Amazing Stories, May 1983.) Who Goes There?
William F. Wu is almost certainly one of the first Asian-American authors to contribute to genre SFF with any regularity, although despite this he’s now a pretty obscure figure; it probably doesn’t help that he’s written little fiction since the turn of the millennium. Wu got started in the late ’70s and would come out a decade later with some big awards nominations, including a Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy nomination for “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium.” He got another Hugo nomination for his 1985 vignette “Hong’s Bluff,” which I reviewed for Young People Read Old SFF. Thus this is not my first run-in with Wu, and my little exposure to him tells me we share a fondness for Westerns and the romanticized image of the American frontier. I may have to find Hong on the Range.
This is now the second story I’ve covered to get turned into a Twilight Zone episode—this time for the ’80s series.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1983 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. It was first reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 10 (ed. Arthur W. Saha), and collected in the Wu volume Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium and Other Oddities. Since it got adapted for The Twilight Zone it’s only natural that it would appear in New Tales from the Twilight Zone (ed. Martin H. Greenberg). These, sadly, are all out of print, and despite its awards attention this story has not been collected in anything since the ’90s; and mind you, it’s Wu’s most popular story.
Enhancing Image
Wong is a dock worker for a New York Chinatown who also happens to be—let’s call him the substitute overseer of a very strange shop. Of course, Wong didn’t ask for this job and he’s not getting paid for it; the real owners of the shop have gone missing and Wong, for reasons unclear to himself, decided to take their place until they return. If they return. It’s a big place that expands to accommodate its stock seemingly endlessly. “The shop was very big, though crammed with all kinds of objects to the point where every shelf was crowded and overflowing.” There are crates everywhere, even ones hanging from the ceiling, filled with all kinds of junk.
True to what the title would make you think, it’s indeed a lost and found center where people can find lost items—and even belongings of theirs that are far more abstract. The story starts out with Wong helping out a much older woman (she has a name, but it doesn’t matter) look for a lost chance at becoming an artist in her youth—a lost opportunity that has taken the form of a bottle’s contents. The way it works is that if it’s a physical item that has been lost then it can found as a solid or liquid object in one of the many boxes; but if it’s an idea, like a decision not made or a part of one’s personality, then it would take the form of a gas that must be inhaled to take effect. The latter is harder to get a hold of, as once the bottle is opened and the vapors come out, the person has only one chance to capture it. Sadly for the old lady she fumbles her bottle and fails to take in the vapor. This all sounds pretty high-concept, although I have to admit Wu doesn’t do a lot with it in the story itself.
There’s not a lot of plot to go over, as this is little more than a vignette, but let’s talk about the mechanics of the shop since I suspect that’s the reason readers took such a liking to it. Wong has been working and basically living in this shop off and on for the past couple months, living off of food scraps, which would be impossible considering his responsibilities to his real job if not for the fact that time moves differently in the shop. “The dual passages of time in here and outside meant that I had spent over two months here, and I had only spent one week of sick days and vacation days back in New York, on the other side of one of the doors.” Even with that time dissonance, though, he’s just about at the end of his rope, losing his patience with people he helps but also knowing he only has so much time he can spend here. The real problem—the internal conflict, since there’s not much of an external one—is that Wong is a bit of an asshole, despite his “job.”
This comes to a head when Wong gets another “customer” in the form of a nameless young woman (Asian-American, like Wong) who has apparently been hiding out in the shop for some time now, watching Wong and judging (correctly, in all fairness) him unworthy of his position. It’s here that we’re given a reason for why Wong is so callous: growing up a victim of racism made him stone-hearted. On the one hand it now reads as cliched that a person of color gives childhood racism as the reason for their trauma, but it would’ve been novel at the time in magazine SFF to have that background be written by someone who almost certainly experienced the same thing in their own life. This story is a whole forty years old now and having two of the three main characters be non-white was certainly uncommon then, although in that sense it now reads as unexceptional.
One more thing about the shop. You may be asking, “How do you find anything here?” The idea is that there’s a customer and an overseer, and the customer would not be able to find what they’re looking for on their own; but the overseer is guided by a ghostly light which shines on the object of the customer’s desire. In other words, if you wanna find anything, you need a partner. The young woman is looking for something herself—a part of her personality that somehow she had lost, and while she disagrees with Wong’s attitude, she does need his help. The lost part of her personality, as it turns out, is her sense of humor, which makes her a good deal more bubbly—not that that helps Wong much. The back end of the story thus sees a sort of comedic-straight dynamic between Wong and the young woman, or one could think of it as a master-apprentice thing.
There Be Spoilers Here
The roles reverse as, having been helped, the young woman decides to help Wong in return—if only to make him more caring. Wong claims to have lost his sense of compassion, and while he ends up fumbling the bottle for that (mirroring the old lady earlier), he does find two bottles containing other things lost—only he’s not quite sure what’s inside. Had this been a horror narrative it’s at this point that we might be greeted with a horrific part of Wong’s background or personality that had been forgotten, like suddenly remembering a crime he had committed long ago. But this is not horror and what Wong finds is fairly pleasant: the first is a nice memory that he had forgotten, and the other is his integrity. While he didn’t get his compassion back exactly, he did get some of it along with his integrity “in a package deal.” It’s sweet. Wong didn’t think he owned the shop before, but now he feels genuinely responsible for it, even suggesting the young woman should become his assistant. How they intend to make a living off this is anyone’s guess.
Maybe I’m also an asshole, but I couldn’t help but think about how one is supposed to make money with this place. I mean, it’s a lost and found center, but I feel like services this esoteric shouldn’t come free.
A Step Farther Out
Upon reading “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” I wasn’t really sure how to feel about it. It’s cute, but despite the neat premise Wu gives us the ends were more banal than I would’ve hoped. We get the slightest hint of something cosmic lurking around the corner, since while the workings of the shop are explained somewhat there is much that is left a mystery, but this is very much not a horror narrative. Admittedly if it did turn out to be horror then I probably would’ve complained that such a premise leading to horror is trite, so I suppose I’m being unfair with it. The problem may be that while I can’t say it has aged poorly, it would probably not catch people’s attention if published as a new story today without a word changed. Urban fantasy, even from POC perspectives, has really taken off since 1983, so that while it was prescient, it has since been surpassed.
See you next time.
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The Observatory: Damon Knight, Failed Magazine Editor
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, November 1976.) Sometimes the topics for these editorials can venture into “serious” territory, but this one is rather frivolous, being about a little footnote in genre history that nobody living today thinks about—probably not even the likes of John Clute. At the same time it’s such an odd footnote that I had to turn it into a thousand-word essay, so sit back and enjoy your coffee while I talk about one of the most important figures in old-timey American SF and how he, if not mostly for circumstance, could’ve been a very fine magazine editor on the level of Ed Ferman or even Anthony Boucher. There were brief spots in the ’50s, in fact, when Knight got the chance to flex his editing muscles—only he got the plug pulled far too early.
Knight, as you know, started out in the ’40s as a critic—arguably the first serious critic in American magazine SFF. He was a bratty 20-something who made no bones about his opinions, and it was also clear that he was a little more “literary” than the average bear, which would put him in the same boat as Brian Aldiss and fellow Futurian James Blish. Reviewers in the field at the time were sometimes accomplished writers who turned to reviewing, such as Boucher and P. Schuyler Miller, but Knight was a reviewer who then turned to writing fiction—almost as a way of proving that he could do himself what he wanted other writers to do. While his criticism is not what Knight is now most known for, he did win a special Hugo in 1956 for his book reviews, and no doubt his astute breaking-down of other people’s work led him to be just as demanding with his own fiction.
Knight’s success in fiction was not immediate, but 1950 would see two of his most famous short stories in print: “Not with a Bang” in the Winter-Spring 1950 issue of F&SF, and “To Serve Man” in the November 1950 issue of Galaxy. These are not works of great depth, but they are memorable and quite functional, being written very much in the O. Henry mode wherein we’re given a setup and a twist payoff in the span of ten pages or less. Knight would write more ambitious stories in subssequent years, but it can’t be denied that 1950 was a watershed year for him—and not just for his most remembered stories. Working as an assistant under Ejler Jakobsson, Knight got a first taste of what editing a magazine was like with the revived Super Science Stories, and this experience seemed to encourage him to strike out on his own and make a magazine in his own image.
Still only 27 when he would’ve begun work on Worlds Beyond, Knight got to start his new magazine with Hillman Periodicals, who, at a time when the SFF magazine market was about to explode, wanted a hit as soon as possible and had no patience when they didn’t get it. Worlds Beyond hit newsstands in November with the December 1950 issue, and for a first issue its contents certainly catch one’s attention. On top of original works by Fredric Brown, Mack Reynolds, C. M. Kornbluth, and future detective fiction heavyweight John D. MacDonald, we have reprints by a couple unusual names such as Franz Kafka and Graham Greene. Knight’s policy with reprints at first looks like he’s taking a cue from F&SF (which had quite a few reprints at the outset), and he probably was—but the choice in authors is telling. Whereas Boucher and McComas picked pre-pulp authors who generally were known for supernatural fiction, Knight picked authors who are not usually associated with genre fiction.
There was another reprint in the first issue of Worlds Beyond that should catch one’s eyes: Jack Vance’s “The Loom of Darkness,” published earlier that year in The Dying Earth as “Liane the Wayfarer.” Vance was still pretty early in his career, and The Dying Earth initially saw very little attention, being a small collection of connected fantasy stories that really did not read like anything else at the time; but clearly Knight was enamored with it. That issue of Worlds Beyond no doubt introduced some readers to the Dying Earth series. Vance would appear again in the February 1951 issue with “Brain of the Galaxy,” reprinted thereafter as “The New Prime.” Another author who clearly appealed to Knight was fellow Futurian C. M. Kornbluth, who also appeared in two of the three issues—although that latter appearance was reprints rather than original fiction.
Worlds Beyond obviously took after F&SF to a degree, but whereas F&SF started out as a “classy” genre outlet with more emphasis put on supernatural fantasy (it was indeed The Magazine of Fantasy initially), Knight was not afraid to print fairly pulpy science fiction if the actual writing—the substance of the work—met his standards. There was about a 50/50 split between original fiction and reprints, and for something that lasted only three issues there’s a disproportionate amount of notable work here, such as Vance’s “The New Prime,” Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm,” Judith Merril’s “Survival Ship,” William Tenn’s “Null-P,” and Harry Harrison’s debut story (he was already active as an illustrator) “Rock Diver.” Knight also ran the book review column for each issue, which makes sense considering he was already perfectly qualified for that job—and anyway Knight’s reviews are often informative, if caustic. This all seems like a recipe for success.
Worlds Beyond might’ve prospered, or at least survived until the market crunch of 1955, if not for Hillman Periodicals seeing the lackluster numbers for the first issue and immediately pulling the plug. The second and third issues were already being printed when the magazine got the ax, so we’re lucky enough to have three issues instead of just one. Still, it must’ve been a blow for Knight, as he would not return to magazine editing for nearly a decade—but thankfully he would return, if only for a short while again. It’s a bit of an odd coincidence that Knight edited two magazines in the ’50s and they both lasted only three issues under his watch; no more, no less. Of course, If was a reasonably ssuccessful magazine before Knight came along and it would persist long after he left, being something of a chameleon, changing colors depending on who’s running the show—for better or worse. Genre historians often make note of how If reinvented itself under Frederik Pohl’s editorship, but its transformation under Knight was almost as radical, as we’re about to see.
(Cover by Ed Emswhiller. If, December 1958.) For most of the ’50s If was a second-tier magazine that sometimes published very good fiction but otherwise had little to distinguish itself. It began as a pet project for James L. Quinn, published by Quinn’s own company and with him as the editor for most of the decade. If‘s quality under Quinn fluctuated depending on who was working as Quinn’s assistant (i.e., doing much of the heavy lifting) at the time, but in 1958 Quinn let go of the reins (mostly) and gave them to Knight, so that while Quinn still kept an eye on things as the publisher, Knight suddenly had more control of the magazine than if he was “just” an assistant. As with Worlds Beyond, Knight also ran the book review column, which shouldn’t surprive anyone.
The October 1958 issue was the first to have Knight’s name on it, and if we’re being honest it’s a pretty weird issue on its face, just going by the theme. Yes, the October 1958 has a shared theme between the stories, although this was appearently done after the fact (the authors had no intention of their stories connecting somehow) and it was Quinn’s idea, not Knight’s. The idea was that we would get a chronology—let’s call it a future history—of mankind and space flight. It’s an obnoxious gimmick that didn’t actually amount to anything of substance, but there are still a few notable pieces here, including works by A. Bertram Chandler, one of the first stories by Richard McKenna (sadly gone too soon), and one of Cordwainer Smith’s more famous stories, “The Burning of the Brain.” Smith’s piece was part of a future history, but not the cobbled-together one that the issue proposes; instead it’s part of his Instrumentality series.
Something to keep in mind about Smith is that up to this point he had only appeared a few times in the magazines, with his work being a little too eccentric and ambitious for most editors at the time. Indeed his debut story as an adult, “Scanners Live in Vain,” took about five years to see publication, and only then in an obscure little semi-pro called Fantasy Book. Fred Pohl would later take an immense liking to Smith, even calling first dibs on all his work and printing most of it in the ’60s—but before Pohl there was Knight, who must’ve gobbled up whatever Smith had on hand, since every issue of Knight’s If had a Smith story. McKenna also appeared in all three issues, first under “R. M. McKenna” and then under his full name. Other big names include Fritz Leiber, Algis Budrys, Margaret St. Clair, Philip K. Dick, and even an early appearance from David R. Bunch, who would later become much associated with the New Wave.
A rule of thumb with magazines changing editors is that it takes several issues for the new boss to carry about their policy, since they would have a backlog of purchased stories to deal with and, after all, Rome was not built in a day. What’s impressive about Knight’s If is that in only three issues, the magazine was reshaped to fit Knight’s rather quirky parameters, becoming wholly his own by the second issue. The standard of the fiction had gone up, certainly, but combining that with Knight’s review column and his obvious bias with certain authors, I have no doubt that had If kept going like this for even another year or two it could’ve easily surpassed Galaxy, which at this particular point in time was not putting out its best work. H. L. Gold, at one point the finest editor in the field by a considerable margin, had become noticeably fatigued by the end of the ’50s, letting Pohl do a considerable amount of the heavy lifting for him before giving him the reins in light of a car accident that left Gold physically disabled.
Knight would have continued raising the bar for If, but Quinn saw a lack of profits for the magazine and decided to sell it to another publisher, and Knight did not come with the package. It was a loss even more arbitrary than the axing of Worlds Beyond—nothing more than cutthroat publishing industry nonsense. Knight went back to writing fiction, even trying his hand more earnestly at writing novels (not his strong suit), while If skipped what would’ve been the April 1959 issue before returning with the July issue, this time under a worn-out Gold as editor. For those keeping track it must’ve looked like If was on the verge of shutting down unceremoniously before returning in a somewhat regressed state; it would not come even close to the forefront again for several more years. But for a brief moment—all too brief—we got a glimpse of a magazine that started as one step above pulp that could’ve been a real contender.
The experience, of course, was not a total loss: Knight would return to editing again—only this time it was for books, not magazines. The first volume of Orbit appeared in 1966, with Knight expressing a noble mission statement of publishing science fiction that likely would not see print in any of the magazines—fiction that was too experimental, too mature, too literary for magazine editors (in the US, anyway) to touch. The plan worked. The Orbit series saw some very fine work by voices who probably would not have prospered in the magazine market at the time, including Kate Wilhelm, R. A. Lafferty, and most importantly of all, Gene Wolfe, who wrote such memorable stories as “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” and “Seven American Nights” with Knight as both editor and coach. The Orbit series proved the validity of both the New Wave and original anthologiess as an alternative market, and while it did occasionally print nigh unreadable garbage, Knight’s achievement here is hard to overstate.
With that said, I do occasionally think about what we lost…
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Serial Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson (Part 3/3)
(Cover by M. Isip. Unknown, May 1940.) The Story So Far
Theseus, known as Captain Firebrand the infamous Greek pirate, has landed ashore on the island of Crete, at the time the most powerful empire in the world despite its small size. Separated from Cyron, his right-hand man, along with the rest of his crew, Theseus now stands alone except for a crafty but “minor” Babylonian wizard named Snish. Every nine years games are held in Knossos, the capital palace of Crete, to see if anyone is worthy to succeed Minos as the ruler of the island—and to take his beautiful daughter Ariadne as their bride. Things seem to be going well until Theseus’s disguise breaks at the worst possible moment and he gets taken into prison, to be thrown into the labyrinth and meet his death at the hands of the dreaded Minotaur, known to Cretans as the Dark One.
With Snish’s help once again, Theseus hatches a plan to break out of prison and into Ariadne’s bedchamber, where, for reasons unfathomable to both Our Hero™ and the reader, Ariadne admits her intense love for the Greek pirate and they almost agree to escape the island together—only Theseus still has a job to do. The plan is foiled and Theseus is caught once again, and this time is thrown straight into the labyrinth, naked and weaponless, although not bitchless, as Ariadne still helps him in the few ways she can. Reunited with his beloved sword, Theseus thinks he might stand a chance against the Minotaur, only to be blind-sided by what feels like a horn grazing his side. The Greek pirate seems to be in quite the pickle!
Enhancing Image
Good news: it’s a fake-out. The “horn” belongs to Cyron, who was also tossed into the labyrinth and left to be either killed or die from the elements. The two recognize each other and it’s a sweet reunion—only problem being that they’re still trapped in a maze with no obvious way out. It’s here, however, that we’re given what is perhaps the biggest twist in the narrative, which is that despite a statue of the Minotaur being constructed in the labyrinth, the Minotaur himself seems to be nonexistent—an elaborate ruse devised by Minos centuries ago to keep the Cretans in line. Those trapped in the labyrinth either kill each other, themselves, or die presumably from starvation, for hitherto nobody has escaped to tell of the big lie that has haunted the island for so many years.
This has to be coincidental, but I couldn’t help but think if maybe John W. Campbell had a certain theme in mind, as The Reign of Wizardry was serialized back-to-back against Robert Heinlein’s If This Goes On—, which also covers religious fear and tyrants using the people’s faith to rule over them with an iron fist. In the case of the Heinlein novella there’s a conspicuous aside where we’re told that Christianity is totally fine actually, and that the villains of the story are using a religion similar to Christianity but actually something different. The Abrahamic God also gets off pretty easy in Williamson’s story, but in fariness it takes place in pre-Christian times, so it’s only natural that the religion of evil has nothing to do with what some reader at the time would’ve believed.
The Minotaur turning out to be a fabrication is inherently disappointing, since it deprives the narrative of what could’ve been a gripping cosmic element, but in the context of a work written specifically for Unknown I begrudgingly admit it makes sense. Works published in Unknown generally try to urbanize the creatures of myth, such that they become either as ordinary in the context of the story’s world as a real-life animal, or they turn out to be something that can be easily rationalized. The result is that there’s very little cosmic horror to be found in Unknown, and I think this is compounded by Williamson being such a rational storyteller, although his fast-paced pulp action style of writing at this point in his career can make this rationalism not so obvious. That the Minotaur does not exist in this rendition of the Theseus-Minotaur myth is only fitting for something published in a “rational fantasy” magazine.
What’s not so easy to rationalize is Ariadne’s cooperating with Theseus in overthrowing her father, which only becomes harder to swallow as a couple more twists come our way. I’ve said this before, but I wanna stress that Ariadne is a far worse-written leading lady than either of the female leads in The Legion of Time, which who were not exactly deeply realized themselves but who served clear purposes in the narrative. Ariadne’s seems split between her loyalty for her father and her newfound passion for Theseus—the problem being we have no reason to believe Theseus and Ariadne would love each other. It’s one of those inexplicable romance plots that plagues old-school pulp writing, only here it’s more conspicuous because Williamson is going for something a little more high-concept. Sure, it’s a somewhat neat premise, but the characters are still lacking in psychology; we’re not allowed to understand the why of anything.
Anyway, Theseus and Cyron lead a rebellion against the higher-ups of Crete on the basis that the Minotaur, the thing that supposedly lurked in the island’s depths, is not real, and therefore the power of the wizards is based on a falsehood. It goes pretty well! People are surprisingly quick to believe the guy who has been on the island for maybe three days. But there’s still work to be done. Minos goes down without much of a fight, although Theseus realizes that the old wizard might not be dead after all, as the doppelganger, upon dying, turns into “an old, old woman” whose real identity is unknown—for the moment. The real Minos must be hiding somewhere, but Theseus struggles to articulate this, and for now it looks like the day might be saved. Ariadne, who as it turns out is not much of a fighter, encourages Theseus to escape with her using a flying machine (what?) Daedalus had built, but Our Hero™ refuses. Something is not right.
It’s here at the novel’s climax (which also happens to be its ending, since the story ends right when the action does) that we get back-to-back twists, which I have some very mixed feelings about. The first is that impossibly old lady who died disguised as Minos turns out to be… Ariadne’s mother, who, mind you, was a non-presence up to this point; I honestly thought she was dead already, but apparently she chose to take Minos’s place by the time Theseus appeared on the island. I don’t get any emotional weight from this since we have no clue who Ariadne’s mom is as a character, and we barely even get a glimpse of how Ariadne’s feels about her own now-dead parent. It feeds into the other twist I’m about to give and it does explain “Minos’s” odd behavior before, but I honestly would’ve preferred if they just got some random person to stand in for Minos.
The other twist is that Snish, the real Minos, and Talos are all the same person. Let’s sit around a bonfire and ponder this. Snish and Talos—you know, the giant bronze statue, are both disguises for Minos. Theseus recalls, during this revelation, that he never saw Snish and Talos in the same place, and that Snish and Minos being together can be explained by “Minos” being a fake here. I will say, this is not, strictly speaking, a self-contradicting twist, and it’s also a twist I did not see coming, which would give it a point each—bringing its score to a total of two points. Yeah, otherwise it reads as fucking stupid to me; there’s really no other way for me to describe it, other than it feels dumb somehow. I figured Williamson would dish out a few twists in the name of subverting the myth, but he may have gone too far. It doesn’t help that through all this Ariadne is still a blank slate.
But due to the power of “love,” Ariadne gives Theseus the deus ex machina necessary to defeat her father and end the reign of wizardry on Crete for good. Personally if I was pining for Ariadne I would be concerned by the fact that she played a part in the deaths of both her parents, but Theseus is not so bothered by that detail. It ultimately doesn’t matter, though, as it’s implied that Ariadne dies from… something, going limp in her man’s arms. Maybe she’s just tired. I could take a nap myself. Theseus kisses his dead (or maybe just sleepy) girlfriend and the novel ends. Even if Ariadne is not dead at the end, the chemistry between the two is so inert that Theseus may as well be making out with a corpse.
A Step Farther Out
In a deliberate attempt to extinguish wonder, Williamson replaced it with something of very little substance. I have to think The Reign of Wizardry got a Retro Hugo nod because there wasn’t much competition that year. Jason and the Argonauts it ain’t. I suspect the reason it gets so little wordage in Williamson’s autobiography is because there was little he could say about it, other than that it was his first attempt at writing more “mature” fantasy and that it getting published technically made it a success. While it now only exists as a footnote in a pretty good writer’s oeuvre, it did do good in that it probably encouraged Williamson to write a much better and more unique fantasy story—that being “Darker Than You Think.”
See you next time.
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Novella Review: “The Earth Quarter” by Damon Knight
(Cover by Anton Kurka. If, January 1955.) Who Goes There?
While he didn’t write bestsellers, Damon Knight had a pretty substantial impact on the direction American SF would take in the ‘60s, as author, critic, and especially editor. He started out as a critic in the ‘40s—one of the first serious book reviewers in the field—before trying his luck at short fiction. After all, a critic who can practice the art he criticizes has more legitimacy—at least to cranky writers who can’t take criticism. But Knight was pretty good at the short story thing, and nowadays that might be what he’s most known for, although his Orbit series of original anthologies was seminal in promoting the New Wave.
In the ‘40s and start of thr ‘50s Knight wrote some memorable shorts that very much operated in the O. Henry mode (see “To Serve Man”), but as the ‘50s progressed he grew more ambitious. “The Earth Quarter” struck me as maybe being a more substantial effort from Knight—an assumption that proved correct. This is one of the best SF novellas from the ‘50s that I’ve read, not just from the ingenuity of its plot but its depth of character and subtlety of implication. Knight gets a remarkable amount of work done in just under 20,000 words while also giving us one of the few truly anti-Campbellian narratives at a time when readers still treated John W. Campbell like he worked miracles. It’s a subversive and nasty little piece of work, but it reflects a humanism that was not too common in magazine SF then.
Despite its outstanding quality “The Earth Quarter” is a fairly obscure novella, which is why I was stunned to find that I’m not even the first person this month to have reviewed it. James Wallace Harris covered “The Earth Quarter” exactly a week ago for his site, in succinct and enlightening fashion. With that said, he did call it an immensely cynical work and I don’t think “cynical” is the right word here. I do think Knight wants to believe in the good of humanity, but, at least in this story, humanity’s optics are quite bad. It’s a story about the futility of racial supremacy—explicitly human supremacy and, more implicitly, white supremacy.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1955 issue of If, which is on the Archive. Knight later expanded “The Earth Quarter” into a longer novella, “The Sun Saboteurs,” and you’re more likely to find that longer version in book form—made more confusing because that longer version would also be printed under the original (and better) title. Good news is that if you wanna read the original you can do it free and easy on Project Gutenberg, since apparently Knight cared little enough for the original version to let it fall out of copyright. “The Earth Quarter” being in the public domain actually gives me a fun idea, as I will eventually explain.
Enhancing Image
First a word about the circumstances under which this review is being written. It’s Saturday the 9th as I’m writing this and my laptop is still at the repair shop; therefore I’ve had to work on this site via suboptimal means. Unfortunately I don’t have the leisure to write to my heart’s content here, which is a shame because a lot can be said about “The Earth Quarter” and I’ll have to keep things concise—by my standards. I know that won’t mean much if you know me.
Anyway…
Good news: Mankind has not only voyaged out to the stars but come into contact with multiple intelligent alien races. Bad news: Earth itself is now little more than a dustbowl, with those left on the planet living almost like cavemen. Those who journeyed out to space aren’t doing a whole lot better, with little pockets of humanity scattered across planets owned by more advanced alien races and relegated to ghettos. Man has come to find that he is, in fact, at the bottom of the galactic food chain, more being allowed to live on other planets than to own that right.
This brings us to one of these ghettos, the Earth Quarter, “sixteen square blocks, about the size of those of an Earth city, two thousand three hundred human beings of three races, four religions, eighteen nationalities,” under the supervision of the Niori, a docile and bug-like race who nonetheless hold a metaphorical sword over the human refugees. We only see the Niori once and they’re not directly involved in the plot really, but Knight uses them as an example of how alien life can be akin to angels in relation to humanity. This is a story about humans, but I don’t think the point would quite get across if aliens were kept totally offscreen.
We’re introduced to Laszlo Cudyk, a local trader, thoroughly middle-aged and not one to take action himself; actually he’s almost as passive a protagonist as you can get, which normally would be a negative except that Cudyk’s passiveness is very much part of his character—his internal conflict. Cudyk claims to be neutral in a deeply political situation, between those who want to continue living in the Quarter, those who want to return to Earth, and those who want war with the Galactics, but he is ultimately a man at war with himself.
As for taking sides, we have two passionate and charismatic figures, both of whom have radical visions but with very different goals. On one side we have Harkway, who wants to gather people together and rebuild a fragment of civilization on Earth, “a liberal fanatic” as Cudyk calls him—I have to suspect with a bit of irony. In the opposite corner we have “Captain” Rack, a military veteran who clings to his rank despite Earth’s Space Navy having been defunct for two decades. Rack is the story’s villain, and he and his devoted underlings wanna rebuild Earth’s capacity for war—in this case war with the aliens. Not just galactic war but, Rack hopes, extermination of what he repeatedly calls “vermin.”
Let’s stop and think about how we actually don’t have a lot of great villains in old-timey SF. Sure, you have the Mule in Foundation and Empire and Baron Harkonnen in Dune, and if you want a more recent example we have Tomas Nau in A Deepness in the Sky; but pre-2000 SF doesn’t offer much in the way of great individual baddies. SF is more keen on abstractions and systemic terrors, such as tyrannical governments (consider that Big Brother is an iconic idea, but not an actual character), than flesh-and-blood people as antagonists. Had “The Earth Quarter” been a novel I think people would recall Rack as one of the great SF villains, because he such a delicious piece of shit.
Rack is a Jack London-esque figure in that he is charismatic, courageous, larger-than-life, a stone-cold adventurer—and also a violent racist. (London himself thought it a swell idea if whites could exterminate the Chinese and take their land.) Had Rack been in a story written for Astounding he would very likely be the protagonist, but here Knight shows us what a mad bastard like Rack would sound like from an outsider’s perspective. And yet, as Cudyk notes, Rack is technically not without redeeming qualities, for while he is several things, he is certainly not a coward. What makes him an effective villain is that while he is delusional and a genocidal maniac, he can also convince people to do his bidding—even murder those he deems his enemies.
Not that Knight was opposed to submitting to Astounding, as he did just that several times, but it’s clear that it was far from his go-to outlet and that this likely had to do with his ideological opposition to Campbell, who by the ‘50s had only become more of a reactionary. Astounding sort of leaned conservative really since its inception, but that conservatism became more pronounced when left-leaning alternatives (namely Galaxy and F&SF) entered the field, so that with exceptions it gained a reputation as a right-wing stronghold. “The Earth Quarter” reads like a reaction to a specific brand of SF that appealed to Campbell, that being SF which was overtly pro-human and/or pro-military. This reads as obvious now, but it must’ve been doubly so for those in the know at the time. The meaning behind Rack’s characterization is hard to misconstrue.
So the inciting incident of “The Earth Quarter” is Harkway making a speech about his vision for the future at what amounts to a town hall meeting, with Rack and his goons waiting in the wings. Cudyk and Seu, the “mayor” of the Quarter, try to keep Harkway from putting himself at risk, but it’s implied that Harkway has a death wish—that he wants to become a martyr for his cause. He almost gets what he wants, but one of Rack’s goons, in a moment of conflicting loyalties, spares him—if only tenporarily. Hours letter, Cudyk finds Harkway, slain, his face literally in the gutter. Denied a public death, Harkway’s absence allows Rack to make his move.
Before I get to spoilers I do have a few more notes to make, including a couple negative criticisms. Just some quibbles. At one point early on Knight describes one of the Chinese characters in racist language, which is a little puzzling since Knight was not a racist and he would’ve been well aware of how East-Asians have historically been denigrated as akin to rats, never mind that it slightly muddies the story’s anti-racism message. There are also no active female characters, with the single woman of any plot relevance, Kathy Burgess, only getting a line or two in and more acting as symbolism than as a character. This is a far-future tale, but gender relations are still very much of the ‘50s and the men are the people who get to do things.
On a more positive note, while descriptions of the Quarter are sparse, Knight crams in a few telling details, such as signs being in both English and Mandarin since the first humans to live in the Quarter were Chinese. While the main characters are mostly white, Knight makes it clear that this is a multi-ethnic community where people are stuck in the same boat. You could expand this short novella into something longer, as Knight would do eventually, but aside from fleshing out side characters I don’t think expansion would improve it much. This is a tightly packed narrative that knows its limitations and works almost like a stage play, which got me thinking…
Harris said that “The Earth Quarter” could work as an old-school film noir, and on a moderate budget since we stay in more or less the same location the whole time and there’s very little action. I agree, but I would go one step farther and say “The Earth Quarter” could be very feasibly adapted for the stage, to such an extent the novella as-is almost reads like a play written in prose already. Aside from Cudyk’s internal monologuing (which admittedly does add a lot to the narrative, but that can be worked around) you would lose nothing substantial by setting the action on a stage.
There Be Spoilers Here
I’m not a fan of the title “The Sun Saboteurs,” for one because it gives the vague impression that this is an action narrative, which it’s not; but it also hints at a plot development that becomes the story’s crisis point. Rack, having gathered enough followers and off-world connections via the black market, hopes to sneak off-planet and lead a fleet of human ships on what would surely amount to a suicide run. That Rack wants ti do battle with the Galactics is not even the worst part—it’s the fact that he has a nuclear weapon, a “hydrogen-lithium” bomb that, if thrown into a sun, would spark a chain reaction and kill a whole solar system.
The sun-bombing plot is the closest the novella gets to pulpy, and yeah, it’s a bit silly, but as a takedown of Campbellian militarism it makes sense. There’s realistically no way that Rack can restore humanity’s supposed former glory by doing this, but that’s not gonna stop him from taking down billions of intelligent beings with him. Luckily the plot is foiled as not only is the human fleet outgunned, but the Galactics have deployed nonlethal means which the humans could not have anticipated. We’re told all this after the fact, in a rather lengthy expository monologue from Rack. It’s clumsy, but if taken as part of a dramatic play it makes more sense to have us told about this far-off action than to be shown it.
The defeated and battered Rack will not stay down for long, though, and in a last ditch effort he tries recruiting men in the Quarter. The men have none of it. Rack almost gets away, but in a moment of stark conscience Cudyk finally makes a firm decisions and throws himself in Rack’s way, preventing his escape from the mob—and guaranteeing a violent death.
Upon regaining consciousness, Cudyk gets updated by Seu on the mob quite literally tearing Rack apart, and it’s implied that despite his civil demeanor Seu was one of those who played a direct part in Rack’s lynching. “There was a thin film of blood on the skin, and a dark line of it around each finger-nail.” Now isn’t that a lovely little nugget of show-don’t-tell? But the victory is a Pyrrhic one, as the Niori are evidently disgusted by the lynching and order the Quarter shut down, putting the humans on ships back to their ruined home world.
The ending is pretty bittersweet. Cudyk considers the irony of how, had he not been struck by conscience and stuck to his vow of neutrality, Rack would’ve very likely been taken in by the Galactics and the Quarter would’ve been allowed to persist. But then maybe this was a necessary push, for while life was possible in the Quarter, change was not. Life on Earth will be hell, but then maybe… Harkway will get what he wanted. Of course that’s an optimistic reading of the ending; it’s possible Knight intended the lights going out in the Quarter to represent a spiritual defeat for humanity.
But one can hope.
A Step Farther Out
A claim has often been made, even by people who know better, that SF was lacking in social awareness prior to a certain point in history (when that point would be is anyone’s guess), and this is obviously hyperbolic. Sure, SF—especially magazine SF—was not constantly turning out think pieces about racism and labor rights in the ‘50s, but the lack of social commentary only hits one’s nostrils if one takes everything literally; on an allegorical level there was quite a bit of social commentary going on, with a lot of left-liberal authors making their points under thin veils of symbolism and implication. With that in mind, “The Earth Quarter” succeeds as a gripping narrative, but it’s also a success as social commentary.
See you next time.
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Serial Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson (Part 2/3)
(Cover by Edd Cartier. Unknown, April 1940.) The Story So Far
Theseus, in his quest to end the reign of wizardry in Crete, takes part in the games to see who might be worthy enough to succeed Minos as ruler of the island empire. Disguised as a viking with the help of the Babylonian sorcerer Snish, Theseus persists through the combat trials, going up against men and bulls as they symbolize the Minotaur, the half-man half-bull dark god who lurks in the labyrinth. Having survived the final test, that of “the gods,” Theseus is one step away from taking control of Crete and claiming Ariadne (Minos’s daughter) as his bride when his disguise evaporates at the worst possible moment. Revealed as Theseus, or Captain Firebrand, the Greek pirate with a bounty on his head in Crete, Theseus is thus thrown into jail, where he awaits his death at the hands of the Minotaur. How will he get out of trouble this time, eh?
Know that this review will be short and sweet, in accordance with the installment but also because certain real-life circumstances have made my laptop unavailable for the next couple days, or rather it has been available and I won’t get it back until tomorrow or Friday. Despite this inconvenience, you can’t keep a good dog down, and while I’ve had to write this post in less-than-ideal circumstances, the show must go on.
Enhancing Image
Theseus, if he were acting alone, would surely be toast by now; it’s a good thing he’s not, as Snish, for reasons unknown, continues to serve despite being mistreated. Despite claiming repeatedly to be only the most minor of wizards, Snish’s ability to cast disguises proves to be a life-saver once again, with Theseus this time luring Phaistro (the Creten admiral he had a run-in with earlier) into a trap and switching places with him. Phaistro buying into Theseus’s promise of hidden treasure was ill-advised and a more reasonable man would’ve smelled something fishy, but it turns out that Phaistro was desperate for that treasure. Disguising oneself as a prominent member of Crete’s navy sounds like a good idea until you realize said member also has a crippling gambling addiction.. with debts to pay.
There’s some irony at play here, and unlike the few attempts at humor in Part 1 it’s actually amusing, if in an exhale-through-the-nostrils sort of way. Theseus goes from having a target on his head to having a different kind of target, attributed to a different person (someone whom Theseus normally wouldn’t mind seeing punished) but now aimed at him. Out of the frying pan and all that. Phaistro owes a ton of money to a servant named Amur who apparently is at the end of his paience with the admiral, now offering one last chance for him to pay off his debt: by “making love” to Ariadne, sort of prostituting himself. I suspect that this is the archaic definition of the phrase, since “to make love” used to mean simply to court, which is probably (but I can’t guarantee it is) what Williamson intended, as opposed to the more modern definition. When exactly the definition changed in the English-speaking world I don’t know, but almost certainly the change happened by 1960. Anyway the idea is that Theseus-as-Phaistro will woo Ariadne, who, we need be reminded, is rather a cold bitch.
This seems like it’ll be the end for Theseus, since Snish’s disguise magic evaporates with a kiss, which was how Ariadne found him out in the first place. The good news is that Ariadne’s chamber will be darkly lit, so that with enough luck Theseus will be able to go in and pull a bit of a sleight of hand a la Anton Chekhov’s “The Kiss,” being a touch in the dark that’s nigh impossible to connect with a face. As should be expected, though, the ruse doesn’t fucking work, as at some point Ariadne figures out Phaistro is really Theseus in disguise… and then she goes along with it. It’s here that we get what has to be the most baffling plot development in the novel, which is that Ariadne actually oves Theseus, after seeing him in the games. Despite having known each other for all of two days and being enemies, Ariadne hopes that (so she says) Theseus will take her off the island where they can have a honeymoon in peace. Theseus, for his part, is skeptical about this, which is understandable given Ariadne’s sppsed affection for him makes no goddamn sense. Not that Williamson is a raging misogynist, but his struggle to write women convincingly is most apparent here.
Inevitably, because this is a novel and we still have at least another 45 magazine pages to go, Theseus gets caught yet again, this time courtesy of the real Phaistro; this time Snish is not here to save him. If you went into The Reign of Wizardry knowing it’s about Theseus and the Minotaur, you go in thinking we’ll get an epic fight sequence with them in the labyrinth; we’re not quite there yet, but the back end of Part 2 does see Theseus get thrown, naked and weaponless, into the labyrinth. Good thing modesty is no issue, or at least would be the least of Theseus’s problems. (Something I’ve noticed with the Campbell magazines is that sex rarely ever gets brought up, even implicitly, no doubt due to Campbell being a puritan and also his devoutly religious secretary scrubbing manuscripts of salty language in advance. However, male nudity, even described in some detail, seems to be fair, with there even being several male nudes as Astounding covers. What’s the meaning of this?) I’m getting distracted.
Being thrown into a deadly maze without a weapon or even clothes would drive most people to despair, but not Theseus, who like a true warrior makes the best of what he can… even using human bones as weapons. It’s here, as we approach our encounter with the Minotaur, that the horror of the so-called Dark God takes on an almost Lovecraftian aura, as Theseus sees a statue of the Minotaur and the creature’s voice without ever seeing the creature itself… and then, without seeing what hit him, there’s a horn digging into his side. Had Clark Ashton Smith written this we would’ve gotten more atmosphere and spookiness, especially with the towering idol of the Minotaur, but I’ll take what I can get. It’s fiiiiine.
A Step Farther Out
After the slog that was the first installment we’re on firmer ground, if only because Williamson has far less setup to worry about; could also be that at thirty pages (as opposed to the first installment’s fifty) there’s less room for suffering. Recently getting into Dark Souls again may have also gotten me into the right mindset for this and that I was being unfair to Part 1, but that’s probably not the case. As we approach the third act it’s become apparent to me that this is indeed a short novel, with hardly enough meat on its bones for what we would not consider a modern fantasy novel. I still wish Williamson would take more liberties with what is quite literally ancient source material, but we’ll see how he manages
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket” by James Tiptree, Jr.
(Cover by Jeff Jones. Fantastic, August 1972.) Who Goes There?
The latter half of the ’60s didn’t see too many outstanding new voices in science fiction; a lot of the supposed fresh meat had actually debuted a decade earlier, including Harlan Ellison, Kate Wilhelm, Richard Wilson, Robert Silverberg, and Anne McAffrey. One of the true highlights to emerge from this period was James Tiptree, Jr., real name Alice Sheldon. Tiptree came to the field very late, already being in her fifties when she debuted in 1968, after many years across different jobs, including a stint in the CIA when it was newfangled. That Tiptree was actually a thoroughly middle-aged woman did not occur to anyone at the time, in part because her real identity was kept a tight secret, and also because nobody wrote like Tiptree when she was on the ball. You read Tiptree and you’re bound to get something that’s energized, highly colloquial, and pitch-black. Reading Tiptree is not a great idea if you don’t wanna feel like garbage.
Although Tiptree died in 1987 (in a murder-suicide with her husband), she’s considered one of the quintessential ’70s SF writers, remaining fresh even when the New Wave was on its deathbed. The early ’70s were especially a fruitful period for her, with such classics like “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” winning her awards. I’m gonna be talking about a more obscure story from this period, and despite being published in Fantastic it really is science fiction, as Ted White all but admits in the introductory blurb.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket” was soon reprinted in Tiptree’s first collection, One Thousand Light-Years from Home, which luckily is still in print and even got a spiffy new edition from Penguin. For anthology appearances the only recent-ish one is The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time (ed. Barry N. Malzberg).
Enhancing Image
Dov Rapelle is a 22-year-old “nice person” (he is Canadian, after all) and burgeoning scientist-to-be who lives in the snowy mountains of Calgary, Alberta. “Calgary has the tallest water-tower on the continent, you know, and all that tetra-wheat and snow sports money.” It’s Christmastime, and things have been going pretty well until Dov gets a weird call from a girl who acts like she already knows who he is, despite the two never having met before—or at least Dov is sure he’s never met this girl before. Another call later with this girl and it’s the same thing. Dov is nice, but he’s not very smart and it doesn’t occur to him that something beyond his understanding may be afoot just yet. Shit’s about to get much weirder.
Before our romantic duo even see each other in person I’m gripped, mostly due to Tiptree’s conversational style that sneaks humor into what would normally be vanilla expositional passages. Reading a Tiptree story is often like listening to someone talk, and I have to wonder what her writing process was such that her writings tend to read like they were dictated—which I mean as a compliment, of course. This would go only so far if the pace was slow, but quite the contrary this is a lightning-fast narrative and there’s a fair bit of ground to cover, what with the time travel and all.
The girl in question is Loolie Aerovulpa, a bratty 16-year-old who is fed up with being kept on a tight leash by her rich dad. Somehow she managed to take a helicopter (no, she didn’t fly it) out to Dov’s cabin, as if knowing where he was in advance. Here she is, a pretty girl Dov’s never seen before, and not only does she act like she knows him, she wants to FUCK. Badly. The consent here is a little questionable, for one because Loolie is so young and also because she is rather pushy with Dov, although the latter gives in quickly enough. (Yes, I was a little distracted by the fact that Dov sleeps with a teenager, but unfortunately if you read enough ’70s SF you have to get used to that sort of thing.) Calling it “love at first sight” may be misusing the phrase. It’s unclear how much Dov comes to feel genuine affection for Loolie, but for reasons given later this may well be part of the tragedy. Like Romeo and Juliet their affection is too strong (at least on one side) to last, and Loolie is about to fail in a noble fashion.
You may be reading the story and thinking, “I know where this is going,” and you’re probably right. This is not the most unpredictable thing ever. I went in expecting a stable time loop and that is what I got—for the most part. Tiptree has a couple little tricks up her sleeve. And again, it’s easy to get wrapped up in her style of narrating even when you’re stroking your chin, confident you know how it’s gonna end. It also helps that while we’ll get our recommended dose of tragedy at the end, the world of the story is also not a hellscape like in a lot of Tiptree stories; but then again, it is set in Canada in the ’70s, albeit with allusions to the future.
Thing is, Loolie did not travel back in time, strictly speaking, although her consciousness did. It’s okay, if you lie on your side and put beer goggles on, that Dov has sex with a 16-year-old because actually that teenager’s consciousness had been momentarily swapped with that of her 75-year-old self. So Dov has sex with an old lady who happens to be in a teenager’s body. I still don’t entirely know what to make of this. It doesn’t help that Old!Loolie tries to tell Dov something important before getting cut off and replaced with her younger self (the reason for this sudden breaking-off is never given), and of course Young!Loolie has no fucking clue what happened. Is this consensual? What does getting bodysnatched by your older self and having sex (and losing your virginity in the process, for what that’s worth) with a guy you’ve never seen before count as? This can’t be right.
Not enough time to think.
Despite what’s happened to her, Loolie grows fond of Dov in a matter of literally minutes, for a reason that’ll be given later but which for now is totally beyond Dov’s understanding. And to make matters worse, the cavalry has arrived. Loolie’s uncle (actually much older cousin) and his enforcer come down in a helicopter as well, “one small hysterical man and one large hairless man” respectively. They were supposed to get Loolie under control before she went off and did a certain something her father had anticipated, as if it were a prophecy, but it’s too late. For better or worse (it’s gonna be for worse), Loolie and Dov are tied together by fate now—a tie that will prove to be both their downfalls, albeit in different ways.
Thinking about it now, it seems that Tiptree wasn’t a big believer in the power of love. True, she married multiple times, admitted to loving both men and women (being the messiest bisexual), and seemed to think the world of her late husband despite what she did to him; but romance, particularly between the sexes, does not thrive in her fiction. More often than not it’s a non-starter. The primary reason is that, for one reason or another, women either live in fear of violence at the hands of the men in their lives or have to suffer it directly. The most stark example of this might be in her novella “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?,” which, without spoiling that story, has what has to be one of the bleakest speculations on the future between men and women in the history of fiction. In the case of “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket” the man and woman might be happy together, but something at the core of their relationship dooms them both.
There Be Spoilers Here
Loolie had been conditioned by her father and psychologist to find sex repulsive, as a sort of mental chastity belt. The only way to break the conditioning, as it turns out, is to bite the big toe of the man she’s with, which will not only break the conditioning but slingshot into a sort of love potion effect whereby she’ll be smitten with said man all the rest of her life. Old!Loolie bit Dov’s big toe after they had sex (which weirded him out, but again, nice guy), therefore Young!Loolie got back into her body with the urge to stay with Dov until the end of her days. Dov ultimately can’t complain about this arrangement, marrying a pretty girl from a rich family. He might even come to love her, if given time; unfortunately he will not be. Time-jumping is supposed to be safe, but there’s nothing protecting you from dying in the body of your 62-year-old self. Dov dies, as both a 22-year-old and a 62-year-old at the same time… somehow.
Loolie must be wracked with grief, naturally, but at some point she asks the same question the reader must be asking: “How the fuck did he die now if he doesn’t die for another forty years?” But the time travel experts don’t have an answer, or at least a good one. Even though time-jumping is reserved for the rich and thus only a tiny fraction of people have access to it, time paradoxes have been popping up. The easiest explanation might be that every time someone jumps they enter a different timeline, but this is just speculation, and anyway Loolie eventually goes back in time to her past self to restart the cycle. So it’s a stable time loop—sort of. Loolie knew how to break her past self’s conditioning because she remembers what her psychologist said about the trigger… because she had gone back in time when she already knew what the trigger was… which she only knew because she already had her conditioning broken…
It’s this chicken-and-egg shit that always makes time travel narratives at least entertaining for me. Nothing to get the gears in your head turning like a time loop with no apparent beginning or end.
A Step Farther Out
Well that wass… dark; although by Tiptree standards I would call it bittersweet, if putting more emphasis on the bitter. She takes what’s really a simple premise and adds her own spice to it. “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket” could’ve been translated to the ’50s or possibly earlier, but you would have to remove the eroticism, the language, and of course Tiptree’s of-its-time street-smart narration which often shrouds her fiction. The ending still hit me in a way, even if the general aura of tragedy is telegraphed well in advance. It’s not revolutionary, but I would say it’s an accessible entry-point for getting to know Tiptree without jumping straight into her most caustic material—which is a mistake a lot of people make.
See you next time.
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Things Beyond: September 2023
(Cover by J. K. Potter. Asimov’s, October 1985.) It’s now September, or as I like to think of it, the month before October. Yeah, I don’t have anything special in mind for this. Summer is about to end, the kids have gone back to school, and I’m about to head back to work as I’m finishing up this post. As has become typical I’ve toyed around with what I’m gonna review repeatedly, right up to the last minute, because I cannot make up my damn mind sometimes. There’s so much fiction, especially short stories, to cover that I’m constantly going, “Hmm, I wanna check this out. But ohhh, what about THIS?” Much as I want to at times I can’t do everything I want in a day. I’m a slow reader and I don’t give myself the heavy loads of someone who gets paid for review columns.
Speaking of making a good use of your time, I recommend subscribing to a few SFF ‘zines; doesn’t matter too much which ones, although I’m biased and I think Uncanny Magazine and Lightspeed are very much worth supporting. Even buying the latest issues of The Big Three™ (Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF) would be a much better use of your time and money than a no-good piece-of-shit (HBO) Max subscription.
Apparently Analog and Asimov’s now have their own digital subscription services, to compensate for the Amazon bullshit, so that’s great honestly. Not sure what F&SF is gonna do since, with all due respect, of The Big Three™ they’re the ones most “behind” with regards to adjusting to changing market forces. We’ll see what happens there.
So what reading materials do we have?
For the serials:
- The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson. Serialized in Unknown, March to May 1940. From a historical perspective, Williamson has to be one of the most intriguing figures in American SFF, debuting in 1928 and more or less remaining active until his death in 2006. At his best he also proves to be one of the most gripping and thoughtful “Golden Age” authors. The Reign of Wizardry was Williamson’s first attempt at writing fantasy that was not in the Weird Tales mode.
- The Chronicler by A. E. van Vogt. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, October to November 1946. In the ’40s and early ’50s van Vogt was a star among genre readers, about on par with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—only since then his popularity has waned massively, for several reasons. A direct precursor to Philip K. Dick (by Dick’s own admission), van Vogt’s influence on the field is still discernable but now understated. He remains a divisive figure.
For the novellas:
- “The Earth Quarter” by Damon Knight. From the January 1955 issue of If. As author, editor, and critic, Knight did much to bridge the gap between ’50s SF and the New Wave, with his Orbit series proving the viability of original anthologies. But in the ’50s he was one of the finer short story writers, with such classics as “Four in One” and “To Serve Man.” “The Earth Quarter” was later revised for book publication, but we’ll be reading the magazine version.
- “Green Days in Brunei” by Bruce Sterling. From the October 1985 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Probably the most important writer of cyberpunk whose name is not William Gibson, much of Sterling’s work is actually not cyberpunk—at least in content. If Gibson codified the tropes that would define the movement, Sterling codified the attitude of cyberpunk, emphasizing the “punk” half of that word. Will be one of two Sterling stories I review this month.
For the short stories:
- “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket” by James Tiptree, Jr. From the August 1972 issue of Fantastic. Real name Alice Sheldon, Tiptree was one of the thorniest authors to come out of the New Wave, being much discussed for the outward feminism (and pessimism) of her work, the mystery of her true identity, and the tragic circumstances of her death. Tiptree made waves in the early ’70s, but I’m going for a relatively obscure story from that period.
- “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” by William F. Wu. From the May 1983 issue of Amazing Stories. Surprisingly, given how obscure a name he is, this is not my first time reading or even reviewing Wu. He must’ve been one of the first Asian-American authors to partake in magazine SFF, and yet he remains to be rediscovered. This story, for one, was up for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award, and it even got turned into a Twilight Zone episode.
Next month is when we’ll be doing all short stories and all spooky shit, so be on the lookout for that. In the meantime my review schedule is pretty normal and I assume nothing will be replaced last-minute.
Won’t you read with me?
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Novella Review: “Beyond Bedlam” by Wyman Guin
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, August 1951.) Who Goes There?
Well, we’ve been bamboozled again. I was gonna write a review of A. Merritt’s 1932 novel The Dwellers in the Mirage, but I basically fizzled out halfway through reading that novel; not that it was a bad read, it was more that somehow the timing did not seem right. I was struggling with Jack Williamson’s The Reign of Wizardry at the same time, a novel whose opening stretch is rather tough going, and reading both at the same time with a deadline in mind wearied me. Whereas the Williamson serial did pick up steam in its second half, giving me the energy to persist, I kept putting Merritt’s novel off and on, until I realized I probably wouldn’t have it finished in time. I’ll cover Merritt someday (considering his influence on other writers and how nearly everything he wrote appeared in the magazines), but I found out first-hand that sadly today will not be that day. Thus a shorter alternative was needed.
One thing I said in my review forecast was that only the novellas covered this month would be science fiction, and that remains true because we’re talking about a novella today that is very much science fiction. “Beyond Bedlam” had been in the back of my mind for a minute, because it apparently encapsulates what made the early years of Galaxy so unique and so ahead of the competition. Truth be told I thought “Wyman Guin” was a pseudonym at first, because it sounds like one. Guin did debut in the field under a pseudonym, but then started using his real name; maybe he was hesitant to do that as he already had a respectable day job. Anyway, he didn’t write much, but it was enough to earn him the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. “Beyond Bedlam” marked Guin’s first story under his own name and it remains his most well known.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been anthologized a few times, as well as collected in Beyond Bedlam, which has all of Guin’s short fiction; sadly these are all out of print, although the latter has an e-book edition. Good news is that you don’t even have to pay to read it in an unambiguously legitimate fashion, as it fell out of copyright and is available on Project Gutenberg.
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(Before we get into the thick of it, be aware that “Beyond Bedlam” discusses mental illness at length in terms that are outdated; not that the language Guin uses is insensitive, but rather that our understanding of mental illness has, like everything else about ourselves, advanced massively since 1950. For the sake of staying consistent with the story, and for my own sanity, I’ll be referring to the condition described in-story as schizophrenia, even though it’s actually recognized as a different condition today.)
Sharpen your pencils, because class is in session.
It’s the 29th century, and things are… a little different. Sure, we have some future tech that one would expect in old-timey science fiction about “the future,” but the technology is not the focus of the story. No, the people have changed far more radically than the tech. We start out in a classroom, with Mary Walden, who is not the protagonist but who will eventually figure profoundly into the central conflict. Thing is, Mary is only half a person—or rather she’s a whole person, but only gets to use the body she’s in half the time. She shares her body with a filthy brat named Susan Shorrs, whom Mary knows nothing about other than she leaves the body shared with Mary in rough shape whenever the “shift” happens. The problem is that Mary is a schizophrenic, which is actually not a problem because so is everybody else. Schizophrenia, a mental illness that was very much frowned upon by “the ancient Moderns” (i.e., us), became more acceptable in the 20th century once psychiatric drugs started developing and became more accessible, not only treating schizophrenics but ushering them into normal society. “The drugs worked so well that the ancients had to let millions of schizophrenic people out from behind the bars of ‘crazy’ houses. That was the Great Emancipation of the 1990s.” After several generations schizophrenics were so entrenched in normal society that they actually started to outbreed non-schizophrenics, and because the Medicorps (mind the “the”) developed a monopoly on psychiatric drugs, and because said drugs became so accessible, schizophrenics soon had to take their drugs as mandated by law. Cut to 900 years later and you have a society (at least in the US, as we learn shockingly little about life outside of it) where everybody (with exceptions, who are themselves now pariahs) is a functioning schizophrenic. The “normal” person is now a body housing two totally separated and autonomous personalities, each in effect a whole person.
I mentioned earlier that Guin had a respectable day job that did not incentivize him to write fiction prolifically; more specifically he was a pharmacologist and advertising executive, so you bet he knew a thing or two about the latest in psychiatric medicine. The strange result is that the premise of “Beyond Bedlam” is patently ridiculous and whose foundations are a little shaky if you go asking too many questions, but for what the story asks of itself it is remarkably internally consistent. Basically, it works off assumptions made in 1950 (so when Guin wrote the story) about how people suffering from mental illnesses like schizophrenia seem to be growing in relation to the general populace. We know of course that as psychiatry has advanced by leaps and bounds that people with mental illness do not necessarily take up a greater percentage of the population, but that doctors have been able to diagnose people with greater understanding, never mind empathy. It’s a fallacy, but it’s necessary in presenting a distant future society wherein the “lunatics” have literally taken over the asylum.
(I could go on for a long fucking while about how this story’s setup clearly anticipates some of Philip K. Dick’s works regarding mental illness [Clans of the Alphane Moon, Martian Time-Slip, and A Scanner Darkly especially], but I won’t, becaue believe it or not I do value your time. I would just be shocked if Dick didn’t read “Beyond Bedlam” when it was first published as it very much reads as proto-Dickian, and also it’s great.)
So how does this work? You have, say, 10,000 bodies in a town but effectively 20,000 people running it. We’re told that historically there have been bodies with three or even four personalities, but while the word “eugenics” isn’t used, it’s made clear that these abnormal schizophrenics have been weeded out, or at best incentivized to not reproduce. A society wherein you have two personalities for every body would present enough of a problem, so it only stands to reason that more would be worse. People are forced into five-day shifts wherein each personality takes over for that duration, followed by a day of rest, between a “hyperalter” and “hypoalter.” The hyperalter is the so-called dominant personality that can, if they really want, interfere with the hypoalter’s consciousness, even invading their dreams. As such, on top of the drugs taken for compartmentalizing personalities, people are also required to take a “sleeping compound” that’ll prevent hypoalters from dreaming and thus risk invasion from their hyperalters.
The system in place to keep people’s lives in order is regimented and also imperfect, which is where the plot comes in; but we’re not quite there yet. “Aren’t you gonna get the plot already?” Soon. The thing about “Beyond Bedlam” is that the plot itself is straightforward, at least when put up against worldbuilding this dense. It’s like when people talk about Stand on Zanzibar but rarely discuss its main storyline; it’s because we all know the real meat of both of these works is in the background, and I do think “Beyond Bedlam” approaches that level of density. H. L. Gold’s editorial for this issue of Galaxy focuses pretty much entirely on “Beyond Bedlam” and how Guin went about writing it, and with good reason. Not only is this a first-rate story, but it probably could not have materialized in the way it did without the intense back-and-forth between Gold and Guin in refining it. Gold is unclear if Guin always intended this to be a novella, but he says that, with his help, Guin revised and rewrote “Beyond Bedlam” a couple times each, going through 80,000 words of drafts. The effort was worth it; this is a three-dimensional depiction of possible life in the future.
Now for the plot…
Mary is the “assigned” child (as people are not raised by their birth parents) of Bill and Helen Walden, who seem to lead a decent middle-class life, except for a couple things. For one, Bill and Helen’s alters, Conrad and Clara Manz, are also married to each other, which it turns out is very much out of the norm. “Such rare marriages in which the same bodies lived together on both halves of a shift were something to snicker about.” Conrad, being the hypoalter, knows that Bill has been “cheating” by messing with Conrad’s shifts for a few hours, but what Conrad does not know is that Bill has been having an affair with Clara, whom as you know is Helen’s hypoalter. Now, monogamy is not taken too seriously in this future society; people have affairs pretty casually, and the Waldens and Manzs are chill about messing around behind each other’s backs. The problem is that Bill is not only messing with a hypoalter (hypers and hypos are kept strictly apart, and never the twain shall meet) but his own alter’s spouse.
What starts as Bill and Clara worming their way around regulations to have their meet-and-fuck sessions soon snowballs into Bill jeopardizing both his own “life” and Conrad’s, both physically and by tempting the wrath of the Medicorps. This is all made worse by Mary becoming depressed and fed up with being neglected by her parents, causing her to break a different taboo by tracking down Conrad and Clara. Having the story start with Mary is sort of misleading since she only appears sporadically, but the classroom setting at the beginning gives us a healthy dose of exposition while also establishing how people in this future might want to break out of their regimented relationships with their alters. Since this is a strictly drug-induced culture, it’s also emotionally stifled, with the positives being that war is apparently a thing of the past (again, at least for the US) and crime seems to have gone down massively. The result is a more peaceful but also less free society where even one’s emotional spectrum is narrowed.
There Be Spoilers Here
The outcome is not surprising. Bill gets caught and put on trial by the Medicorps for a gross breach of conduct, with a guilty verdict resulting in either hospitalization for life or “mnemonic erasure,” i.e., death of the personality. If you’ve read a few dystopian narratives in your time then you’ve been here before, and you also know that Bill has to lose—to play the role of Winston Smith and John Savage. Yet even during what would normally be a been-here-done-that sequence in a dystopian narrative (the third-act breakdown of the rebellious hero), Guin once again shows off the wonderful density of the world he’s made. Mnemonic erasure will affect Conrad’s life almost as profoundly as Bill’s, as, being a single persona in a body, Conrad can’t just go around like one of the ancient Moderns. He still has his five-day shift, but during what would be Bill’s shift he gets put in deep freeze, so as to not interfere with the world of his late hyperalter. (Again, never the twain shall meet.) While Conrad is sort of pleased to see his alter put to death, since Bill’s been a huge recurring pain to him, there’s a cost to all this. With Bill gone, Conrad will now be sort of an outcast, and he will not be any freer than he was before.
So it goes.
A Step Farther Out
I have a two-part argument about SF and novellas. The first part is that SF is imaginative literature, in that it’s a literature chiefly concerned with ideas; the second is that the novella is the ideal mode for a literature of ideas, and by extension ideal for SF. “Beyond Bedlam” has enough meat on its bones to justify a novel, but it gets its point across in 21,000 words. It’s a densely packed depiction of a future society that, while absurd if considered too closely, does what it ought to do, in that it makes the reader think about how this society may be a distant descendent of ours. Guin does what most SF writers don’t in that he envisions a future that is mostly unrecognizable and yet just recognizable enough that we have context. The result is a nuanced dystopian narrative that does not provide easy answers, nor even an easily discernable perspective. If Orwell clearly sides with the individual in 1984, Guin seems unsure about the seesaw balance between individual freedom and public safety. It’s a haunting and mind-bending story, being one of the finest miniature gems of ’50s science fiction.
See you next time.
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Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 