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Short Story Review: “Bloodchild” by Octavia E. Butler
(Cover by Wayne Barlowe. Asimov’s, June 1984.) Who Goes There?
Some authors see their reputations wither after death, and indeed this is more often than not the case; but there are also authors who have the good fortune to receive a second wind posthumously. Octavia E. Butler was a pretty well-respected writer in her lifetime, but in the years since her untimely death in 2006 she has become one of the select few from the old school to be both widely read and respected among the modern SF readership. This is despite Butler not having written a great deal over the course of her life, going from fairly productive in the ’70s and ’80s to only writing two novels in the ’90s, and then finally just one in the 2000s. She also only wrote little more than half a dozen short stories, just enough to fill a single collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories, which is also padded out with an afterword for each story and a few essays. While Butler wrote very little short fiction, though, she won back-to-back Hugos for it, with “Bloodchild” itself winning her that second Hugo, plus a Nebula. “Bloodchild” is one of the most acclaimed and famous (or infamous) of all “modern” SF stories, being Cronenberg-esque body horror while also being surprisingly melancholy. It is Butler’s “pregnant man” story.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Second Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Best Science Fiction of the Year 14 (ed. Terry Carr), The New Hugo Winners (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), Foundations of Fear (ed. David G. Hartwell), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and of course the Butler collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. Really it’s hard to not have at least one copy of this story on hand if you’re a serious SF reader.
Enhancing Image
I said before that “Bloodchild” is a “pregnant man” story (there were more of those being written back then than you would think), but it’s also a coming-of-age story, about Gan, our narrator, recalling a moment in his life that made him cross the shadow-line from adolescence to adulthood. This is a story about the loss of one’s innocence, which means it’s also about trauma. Gan and the rest of his family are Terran settlers who have come to a planet already host to at least one intelligent race, and now they’re stuck on “the Preserve,” with T’Gatoi, an elder of said intelligent race, being their local symapthizer. The Tlic, a somewhat mammalian but also insectoid (they have more than two arms and lay eggs) race, are the ones in control here. Historically, on Earth, there’s a nasty tendency for the colonizing force to overwhelm and then assimilate the indigenous populace, but this is not always so; in her afterword, Butler explains that she modeled the relations between the Terrans and Tlic off British colonialism in India. The humans here are thoroughly outnumbered and outmatched by their alien hosts, and unlike their real-world counterparts it seems like the Tlic can easily kill or drive out the settlers any day if they wanted to. The two parties thus have reached an agreement wherein the settlers are allowed a swath of land while also serving a specific use for the aliens.
The Tlic are some of the more interesting aliens in SF, in that they meet John W. Campbell’s criteria for an intelligent alien that could think as well as a human but not quite like a human. They’re big, at least as big as adult humans, and live considerably longer, with the nutrients from sterile eggs apparently contributing to slowed aging. They also have no issue with slavery, since they buy and sell Terrans, and back in the day they even split up Terran families for this purpose. (Does this remind you of anything?) They and the Terrans are biologically compatible enough that the latter can serve as hosts for Tlic eggs, which… more on that in a second. In her afterword Butler writes that she had taken inspiration for the Tlic when she was doing research for what eventually became her Xenogenesis trilogy. She looked into the workings of the botfly, which as you might know already is a bug found in the Amazon that lays its eggs in living hosts. The larvae, once ready, break out of the host’s skin, which for humans is a gross but by no means fatal business—unless there’s an infection. The Tlic similarly lay their eggs in living hosts, except it’s much worse here, since whatever has the misfortune of carrying Tlic eggs will die in gory fashion when those eggs hatch. The one gripe I have with how Butler conceived her aliens is that while they’re based on the botfly, it’s not a 1:1 comparison, and there are a few unanswered questions. The botfly is an insect, only yay big, and only lives for a few days, while the Tlic are the size of humans, and live for several decades at a time as opposed to days. How such a species would survive without completely ravaging the ecosystem, I’m not sure.
(Of course, given that humans have been ravaging Earth’s ecosystems for decades, it’s possible that our own species will not survive in the long run, or that much of life on Earth will die before us.)
In a sense the Tlic reflect a certain type of human endeavor, while the human settlers are put in the place of put-upon immigrants or enslaved peoples. Butler looks at the minority of whites living in British India, or indeed South Africa, and wonders what would happen if the tables were turned and the white minority were to be subject to the “colonized” populace’s whims. This is oversimplifying things a great deal, but it does make you wonder how it is that Dutch and British whites could make up not even 10% of South Africa’s population, yet to this day own the vast majority of the land there. Typically a minority demographic is beholden to the whims and prejudices of the majority, hence, despite some progress being made, nearly 30% of the population in the US being beholden to the 72% that’s white. So Gan, despite being part of a colonizing force, is not the one in control. In fact he is next in line in his family for carrying a nice batch of eggs, which makes today’s “delivery” quite the learning experience. Bram Lomas, an adult man, has been made pregnant with Tlic eggs, and the operation to get them out of him before they can kill him is most unpleasant. The delivery, which takes up the middle portion of “Bloodchild,” is undoubtedly the most memorable part, being pretty graphic but also serving a purpose in Gan’s character arc. I’m not gonna quote a whole passage from this section of the story, because I don’t hate you that much, but it’s a lot. It’s also worth mentioning that while a more conventional story might have the delivery as the big climax, Butler makes it so that it’s over and done with by the time we’re in the last third. After all, the delivery is not the point of the whole thing, but rather how the experience sparks an epiphany for Gan.
There Be Spoilers Here
The way this works is that delivering larvae for a human might be fatal if there’s a surrogate willing to take the fall. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a live body to receive the larvae. T’Gatoi gives Gan the thankless job of having to go out and kill one of the livestock, one that must be of suitable size, although he’s never done such a thing before and taking a knife to one of the “achti” (some native animal) would be risky. He opts to take a different kind of risk and gets out the gun that’s been hidden in the family home. Guns were outlawed among the settlers decades ago, but as with real-world countries with strict gun laws, one occasionally does find itself inside. After killing the achti and witnessing the finale of the delivery, Gan is understandably shaken by the whole thing, especially since he’s due to go through the same ordeal himself in the future. The final scene is a confrontation between Gan and T’Gatoi in which the former threatens to kill himself, in order to force his sister to be the one in the family to “give birth.” Ultimately he changes his mind and decides to take up the responsibility, but we’re not sure if his pregnancy has already happened by the time he’s relating this story to us or if it’s still off in the future. It’s a rather abrupt ending, which I’m not sure is exactly a negative criticism, but it kinda took me off-guard to have suddenly reached the end on this rereading. This is a setting you could certainly build a whole novel out of, but Butler is content to keep is contained within a single short story.
A Step Farther Out
Sometimes when I read something for this site, I groan with the realization that I won’t have much to write about, usually when it’s something that’s middle-of-the-road. (Unfortunately there is a lot of middle-of-the-road fiction in the SFF magazines, probably way more even than straight-up bad fiction.) On the one hand, “Bloodchild” is a reread for me, but my memory of it was pretty dim; at the same time I knew going in that there would be quite a bit to talk about, but then this is often the case with Butler. It’s not a personal favorite of mine, because it is, by design, a pretty unpleasant read, but it’s a very well-constructed story. I wish Butler wrote more short fiction, but I’m also not surprised that she didn’t.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Yellowjacket Summer” by Robert McCammon
(Cover by Len de Lessio. Twilight Zone Magazine, October 1986.) Who Goes There?
Robert McCammon made his debut in 1978, but didn’t really come to prominence until the latter half of the ’80s, in what was a meteor shower of both novels and short fiction. His longest and most ambitious novel up to that point, 1987’s Swan Song, won him a Stoker, and the next half-decade or so saw a turnout of one novel every year, each one being very well-received. At the beginning, McCammon’s work was decidedly horror, of the Southern Gothic variety (he was born and raised in Alabama), crossed with that rather nostalgic-whimsical style Stephen King became famous for. This mixing of influences arguably reached its climax with Boy’s Life in 1991, which is only nominally horror while at the same time being a mish-mash of several genres. By the time Gone South was published a year later, McCammon had become disillusioned with the horror publishing industry and quit the scene for about a decade, which no doubt hurt his chances at having long-term success, but from his perspective it was a necessary move. “Yellowjacket Summer” is simple, maybe a little too straightforward, but it shows McCammon during a time when he was compulsively writing spooky fiction by the mile. There’s some King in there, undeniably, but also a strong touch of the rural South that’s totally McCammon.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October 1986 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. The only notable reprint is in the McCammon collection Blue World and Other Stories, which is in print.
Enhancing Image
Right away something is kinda off with how McCammon tells this story, and it took me a day’s reflection to figure out exactly what it was: it’s the fact that we have a third-person limited narrator who switches perspectives between characters on a dime and without scene breaks. This is a problem for some people with a novel, but with a short story it’s pretty much a deal-breaker as far as technique goes. We’re in Georgia, in the middle of nowhere at some gas station, with a boy named Toby, who (the introductory blurb basically tells us) has a nasty trick up his sleeve. We soon switch perspectives to a family coming by the gas station where Toby’s at: Carla, the mom, plus her two kids, Joe and Trish. Perspective jumps to Carla, then Joe, then back again, all without a pause in the action, which I found distracting. I cross-examined the TZ printing with how it appears in Blue World, because scene or even chapter breaks might be added or removed for a story between its original printing and elsewhere; but no, I guess this is really how McCammon intended the story to be understood. I know this might come off as overemphasizing a certain flaw, but I do think it seriously gets in the way of what is otherwise a perfectly competent horror yarn about what it’s like to be stuck on the side of the road without cell cervice.
Anyway, what McCammon does do well here is evoke a certain time and place, which I’d already figured from reading Boy’s Life. What Stephen King does for New England, McCammon does for the Bible belt. Consider this description of the gas station: “The ancient-looking gas station, its roof covered with kudzu and its bricks bleached yellow by a hundred summer suns, was a beautiful sight, especially since the Voyager’s tank was getting way too low for comfort.” Ignore that obviously the gas station could not have been around for literally a hundred years, it’s the idea that counts. Now, when the family gets there Joe has to go pretty bad, and when you gotta go you gotta go. Right from the beginning we get the impression that Toby is kind of a bastard, but it’s the scene in the bathroom with Joe that we get our first real taste of Toby’s telepathic power over bees—yellowjackets, specifically. Why he has this power or how he got it, don’t know. This is not a story about the why or the how, and it’s not even a story that’s really “about” anything, other than the visceral horror of being confronted with one mean kid and an endless horde of bees. This is not a fun thing to read about, of course, especially if you’re allergic to bee stings. Thankfully Joe survives the encounter, but unfortunately this is just the beginning of the family’s troubles as they move from the gas station (not being able to get gas there), to a nearby cafe, which happens to be eerily deserted.
McCammon doesn’t strike me as someone who’s into giving incisive social commentary (Consider that Swan Song, a novel clocking in at over 800 pages, has a message that boils down to: “Nuclear war is bad.” Well of course it’s bad, Robert.), but if “Yellowjack Summer” is “about” anything, it’s about the maggot-gnawed husk that is rural America, or what used to be the American frontier. In Georgia we have Atlanta as the beacon of what we think of as civilizatuion, but there are pockets in this state (among others) that seem have been frozen solid decades ago, or gotten quietly left behind by the rest of the country. This story takes place in Capshaw, which is a town, but not much of one. Capshaw is one of many places in America which the country at large has long pushed under the kitchen rug, like some old bread crumbs one can’t be bothered to vacuum up.
Consider this:
The town was quiet except for the distant cawing of a crow. It amazed Carla that such a primitive-looking place should exist just seven or eight miles off the main highway. In an age of interstates and rapid travel, it was easy to forget that little hamlets like this still stood on the back roads—and Carla felt like kicking herself in the butt for getting them into this mess.
I should probably take a moment to bring up an obvious influence for this story, which is Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life.” Had McCammon read the original story as well as seen the Twilight Zone adaptation? Probably. It’s a rock-solid premise: What is a child suddenly got telepathic powers and bent a small town to his will? Toby doesn’t have the world-shattering capabilities of Anthony, but he’s older and more actively sadistic. It becomes clear that one reason why Capshaw is a mostly deserted town is because of Toby, and the few people remaining are too scared to leave. Emma, a rather gaunt woman who works at the cafe, has reached her breaking point by the time Carla arrives, which results in a pretty tense scene. I just wish I cared more. Maybe it’s because of the constantly shifting perspective and the underdeveloped setting, but I found it hard to get invested, even if McCammon has an eye for pacing and this is a smooth read.
There Be Spoilers Here
The good news is that while the yellowjackets do sting a lot, and the chances of getting to real civilization in a van that’s running on E are low, it turns out that evil children are not immune to getting run over with a fucking car. Good to see that child murder wins the day.
A Step Farther Out
Sorry I didn’t have much to say about this one, but sometimes that’s just how it is. I feel like I may have been a bit harsh toward McCammon, but I think it may have to do with his being stronger as a novelist than with short stories. I could be wrong, of course, and it’s possible that “Yellowjacket Summer,” which anyway hasn’t been reprinted much, may just be a relatively weak entry in his vast oeuvre.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Lost Memory” by Peter Phillips
(Cover by Jack Coggins. Galaxy, May 1952.) Who Goes There?
I don’t have much to say on today’s author, partly because I’ve not read anything by him until now and partly because there’s not much I can dig up on him. Peter Phillips was an English SF writer, at a time when there weren’t too many of those, and for about a decade he took up writing SF as a side gig, from 1948 to 1958. If he wrote any other fiction, ISFDB makes no mention of it. He also apparently never wrote a novel, which goes some way to explaining his obscurity, since authors who only do short stories (unless you’re Ted Chiang) get kneecapped in the market. There also has never been a collection of Phillips’s short fiction, even though he wrote little enough of it that you could fit it all snuggly into one volume. He quietly stopped writing SF at the end of the ’50s, incidentally when the magazine market was shrinking almost to the point of imploding. He died in 2012. I don’t even know what he looks like. It’s a shame because “Lost Memory,” my first from him, is very good. It’s the kind of hard-knuckled SF with a disturbing tinge of horror that I really like.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. There’s no Phillips collection, but it’s been anthologized a fair number of times, including Gateway to Tomorrow (ed. John Carnell), Second Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (ed. H. L. Gold), Science Fiction Terror Tales (ed. Groff Conklin), The Great SF Stories #14 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (ed. Hank Davis), and We, Robots (ed. Simon Ings).
Enhancing Image
The action takes place on a planet which is hostile to organic life, it seems, although not to hostile to, say, mechanical beings. Indeed a race of mechanical life has grown here, or rather has produced and adapted itself for the situation. Palil is a robot, and a robot, so he’s like a robot reporter. There’s a storytelling method that often made the rounds in old-timey SF, and which Phillips uses effectively here, which is the reporter-protagonist-narrator. Such an archetype is common at this point, because it’s useful, although it doesn’t strictly follow the rules of “good” storytelling. Palil is the narrator, which means he’s our eyes and ears for how this society of robots operates, and his profession makes him doubly good (and convenient) for the task. The robots are presumably all male, since they don’t reproduce sexually (they probably also don’t have any idea of romance) and the characters in-story all refer to each other by male pronouns. Personally I wish Phillips had gone a step further and made the robots genderless, but this is a quibble at most, so I’m happy to live with it. The robots at the museum have encountered a problem in the form of a crashed ship, which to the reader should clearly be understood as an escape pod for some human or humans; but to the robots this is not clear at all. Palil and the others have no concept of human life, and they associate metal (as opposed to flesh) with life that they treat the ship itself as if it were a living thing.
Get this description of the ship:
He was thirty-five feet tall, a gracefully tapering cylinder. Standing at his head, I could find no sign of exterior vision cells, so I assumed he had some kind of vrulling sense. There seemed to be no exterior markings at all, except the long, shallow grooves dented in his skin by scraping to a stop along the hard surface of our planet.
To “vrull” is a sense the robots have which Phillips never explains, and for all we know it’s something unique to them.
The robots have nonsensical names like Chur-chur and Fiff-fiff, which come to think of it sound like sounds for machine parts grinding and whirring, as in the reptition of machinery. The human visitor, for his part, calls himself Entropy, although it’s unclear if that’s the name of the ship or somehow the man’s own name. This ties into the basis of the conflict: the fact that the robots don’t actually know what it is they’re trying to help. There’s a heavy dose of dramatic irony here, as we know perfectly well that Entropy is a human inside the ship, but Palil and the others don’t know what a “mann” is or what it looks like. They don’t even have the word for it in their lexicon. Aside from telling us what senses they have, we also don’t get really any descriptions of what the robots look like, so there’s a good choice they might not look humanoid at all. Howard Muller’s interior art for “Lost Memory” runs with this possibility and depicts what looks like a nightmarish scene, in which a bunch of weirdly designed robots are operating over a ship, as if the ship itself were the patient.
Observe:
(Interior art by Howard Muller.) While they’re able to establish communications, and both parties just so happen to speak “Inglish,” but this does little to help Entropy, who’s trapped inside his ship and who can barely even comprehend what is on the outside. (By the way, it’s a nice touch on Phillips’s part that Palil spells certain words unconventionally, as if they were either not in the robots’ dictionary or the spelling has simply changed over time. It’s a bit of extra effort that Phillips didn’t need to put in, but he did.) There’s speculation that the robots are the descendants of machines constructed by a fallen human astronaut or crew who had come to this planet many decades ago, that while the human(s) died (perhaps by suicide), their intelligent robots have succeeded them. Society has taken root and ultimately flourished here—only it’s not a human society. Indeed humanity doesn’t seem to have any place here, not because the robots are hostile, but because they’ve completely forgotten what humanity even is, hence the title. This is like a response to many earlier SF stories about man’s relationship with robots, in which the latter have come to either idolize or vilify their creators, but regardless there’s a lasting connection between the two, like a parent with an unruly child; whereas in “Lost Memory,” the connection has long been severed. Robots, at least on this planet, have no need for those who made them.
There Be Spoilers Here
The Fermi paradox is a famous question that’s served as inspiration for many good SF stories, even though it’s relatively recent, not becoming “a thing” until the ’60s. The paradox is basically that there is a high likelihood that Earth is not the only planet even in the Milky Way to contain intelligent life, and yet after all these decades we’ve yet to make contact with said life. The universe seems to be overwhelmingly a cold dead place. The robots of “Lost Memory” are all but confirmed to have been created by man, but they’re still an intelligent race not native to Earth, and the story itself plays out like a first-contact narrative. But, while he has made contact with the descendants of a group of intelligent machines, Entropy doesn’t live long enough to appreciate this at all. The “doctor” who breaks open the ship inadvertently kills Entropy, and even if he hadn’t done so directly, there’s very little chance of the human surviving long afterward anyway. This is a case where the reader can easily anticipate the ending, and yet despite the ending being practically a foregone conclusion, the inevitability of it only raises one’s anxiety as we get closer to the end.
A Step Farther Out
I mentioned Ted Chiang earlier as kind of a joke, but “Lost Memory” does unintentionally read like both a distant precursor and counterpart to Chiang’s “Exhalation.” Both have to do with mechanical life overcoming (or failing to overcome) entropy, but either way a price must be paid. Humans are totally absent in “Exhalation,” but in “Lost Memory” the robots meet a member of the race that created them—much to the human’s detriment. The ending is perhaps predictable, to the point of being inevitable, but this is a rare case where the ending being easily foreseen does nothing to ease mind’s mind at the impending horror of it. Phillips is pretty obscure and didn’t write much, but I’ll be keeping an eye on him.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Punishment Without Crime” by Ray Bradbury
(Cover by Malcolm Smith. Other Worlds, March 1950.) Who Goes There?
We’re keeping things short and sweet today, with a rather self-explanatory story by an author who has little need for an introduction. Ray Bradbury is one of those rare people who’s a canonical SF writer as well as having a place in the mainstream American literary canon; and yet this was by no means inevitable for Bradbury, who started out as a fan at the tail end of the ’30s, writing for niche publications. He spent the next few years honing his craft, until he began getting his first really good short fiction published in 1943, with the next decade being very productive. Bradbury advised young writers to try for one short story a week, a rule he himself seemed to abide for a while, since by by the time he was 27 he’d written more than enough short fiction for his first collection, Dark Carnival. Despite being known best for his science fiction, much of Bradbury’s early work has a horror bent to it, enough that he felt the need to update his first collection with a revised table of contents and a new title: The October Country. “Punishment Without Crime” was not printed in one of the famous collections, but it combines SF with horror and crime fiction in a way that encapsulates some of Bradbury’s interests—if also his shortcomings. It’s also the last in a trilogy of stories about Marionettes, Inc., a company that produces lifelike telepathic androids. Weirdly enough these were all published in different magazines, but each one seems to work as a standalone.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1950 issue of Other Worlds Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Science Fiction Terror Tales (ed. Groff Conklin) and the Bradbury collections Long After Midnight, The Stories of Ray Bradbury, and Killer, Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury.
Enhancing Image
It’s America in the 2000s, and middle-aged middle-class husbands still have not considered that it might be better to divorce one’s wife on grounds of adultery than to kill her. George Hill, our protagonist, at least apparently doesn’t consider divorce to be an option, since lately he’s been thinking about murdering Katherine, his wife. Katherine (or Katie) is about twenty years George’s junior, while George is about fifty, which might explain why Katie’s been having an affair with Leonard Phelps, who is, if nothing else, closer to her age. “Better men than he had taken young wives only to have them dissolve away in their hands like sugar crystals under water.” But still, George is too mannerly, and maybe too decent, to kill his wife; so instead he’s come to the next best thing, which is Marionettes, Inc. Sure, to have a doll, a simulacrum of Katie, and to “kill” this doll, is in itself illegal, but it beats doing the real thing, at least morally. That much should go without saying. What George doesn’t realize, though, is that confronting a simulacrum of his wife may prove just as deadly to him as if he had tried murdering the real Katie. “The violent unviolence. The death without death. The murder without murdering.” And so there might also be, ironically for George, punishment without crime.
Sorry, I was trying out my Rod Serling voice.
This is very much a Twilight Zone episode in spirit, never mind it was published almost a whole decade before TZ‘s premiere. Bradbury consciously fell in with the O. Henry school of short-story writing, which is to say his stories are often structures as akin to jokes, with a setup and a punchline. The punchline is often a cruel one. A contemporary of Bradbury’s, John Collier, wrote along the same lines, to the point where “Punishment Without Crime” could be taken as Bradbury paying homage to Collier, what with the strange preoccupation with husbands conspiring to murder their wives. Bradbury had very likely read some Collier stories by 1949, so it’s possible. (There’s a misoginistic streak running through some of Bradbury’s work that I don’t see people bring up, really.) Anyway, George gets what he asks for, but he also gets something a bit extra in the bargain, what with the doll, being telepathic and sentient to some degree, practically taunting him. This stretch of the story, in which George must reckon with his conflicting feelings about his wife via the fake Katie, is easily my favorite, even if it also quotes liberally from what I’m pretty sure is the Song of Songs. Then again, having George’s sexual insecurity be not only overt but the focal point of “Punishment Without Crime” would’ve been all but unthinkable for a genre SF story just five years earlier. You could get away with something like this in Weird Tales, but the SF magazines of the ’40s were relatively chaste (incidentally Weird Tales was where Bradbury really cut his teeth). There were also the crime fiction magazines, and more importantly the “slicks” (which Bradbury frequented), but “Punishment Without Crime” might’ve been too pulpy and at the same time SFnal for the latter.
If Bradbury has a drawback, it’s that he seems to know only one woman: his wife. The gender politics here are rather off. The fake Katie is a femme fatale, of sorts, while the real Katie is implied to not be any better. Without giving away anything too specific in this section, the ending paints the real Katie as a ruthless schemer who really can’t be bothered if George lives or dies. Is this some weird future where you’re just not allowed to get divorced? Would it really be easier to kill your spouse than the other option? There will be legal trouble either way. Obviously I’m putting too much thought into it. This is a story that’ll take you maybe twenty minutes to read, and it’s written in that fast-paced breezy style Bradbury often used, the result being that even though I have issues with it, at least it goes down smoothly. If you’re a Bradbury fan then you’ll probably enjoy it.
There Be Spoilers Here
When George finally does “kill” the fake Katie, it works a little too well and is a little too convincing, with the Marionettes, Inc. people having even installed fake blood. Maybe it would be enough for George to just have a screw loose and to slip into psychosis over having wanted to murder his wife, but unfortunately for him his creator is Ray Bradbury. George and other clients of Marionettes, Inc. are promptly arrested afterward on charges of murder, even though nobody had actually been killed. As George’s lawyer explains it, it’s a damn shame that the government’s been cracking down on androids as of late, since had this all happened ten years earlier or even ten years later, he’d probably get off fine. As it is, George is sentenced to death, and while we’re not told how much time passes, it can’t be long before he’s on death row, waiting for the electric chair. He’s surprisingly calm about all this, since he’s had a psychotic break, but in a final ironic twist he sees the real Katie outside his cell one day and slips back into lucidity, having enough time to realize that he’s been massively screwed over by the system. It doesn’t matter. Katie’s off with her young boyfriend. Like I said, Bradbury tended to follow the O. Henry line of storytelling.
A Step Farther Out
For someone who’s read quite a bit of Bradbury over the years, I’ve become a bit more ambivalent towards him as I’ve gotten older. Not that he was ever in my top five SF authors or anything, but there’s something too whimsical and childish (in a bad way) about Bradbury’s writing that also reminds me of the worst of, say, Connie Willis, or Stephen King. Hokey? Saccharine? Whatever you wanna call it. Willfully immature. “Punishment Without Crime” is a curious combination of a few genres, on top of being clearly a moral allegory, but it doesn’t quite take advantage of any of its inspirations. It’s also too short and fast-paced to feel like something I should take seriously. I can believe it’s something Bradbury wrote in a week or less, then shuffled off to what was a second-rate magazine. Nowadays I like Bradbury most when he leans all the way into horror, hence my favorite stories tend to be in The October Country and The Illustrated Man.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills
(Cover by Maxine Vee. Uncanny, Nov-Dec 2022.) Who Goes There?
Samantha Mills made her debut in 2012, although she didn’t start getting published regularly until 2018. As she says in an interview for (the sadly now-defunct) Fantasy Magazine, which you can read here:
Over the next few years, my attempts at novels improved rapidly, but short stories remained a mystery until 2017. I can’t fully describe what happened, but after a lot of reading it finally clicked, and I produced a few stories that worked, and I finally began submitting again.
By this point Mills had been out of college for about a decade, so if you’re at such-and-such an age and worried it might be too late to try your hand at getting published professionally, it probably isn’t.
I had said in my review forecast at the beginning of the month that Mills had probably written “Rabbit Test” prior to a certain infamous SCOTUS decision getting leaked in May 2022, but this turned out to be wrong. Mills, like any writer, had the idea of the real-life use of female rabbits for human pregnancy tests tumbling around in the back of her mind for years, but it took the catastrophic Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision for her to think of a story to go with it. She wrote “Rabbit Test” in the summer of 2022 and it quickly got picked up by Uncanny Magazine, who published it just a few months later. Turnarounds for story submissions are usually not this quick, but then “Rabbit Test” is, if nothing else, a deeply timely story, and Mills’s gambit paid off. “Rabbit Test” is only the third story ever to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and it placed first in the Locus poll.
I remember when awards season was underway and there was a lot of very good word-of-mouth regarding “Rabbit Test” online, which no doubt contributed to it sweeping. It’s a story that spoke incisively of “the moment” (although “the moment” is now three years behind us) in American politics, that worked to get a reaction out of left-liberal readers, and so it did. But, again, that was three years ago. How does it hold as a story, some time after its own “moment” has passed?
Placing Coordinates
First published in the November-December 2022 issue of Uncanny Magazine, which you can read here. It’s since been reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (ed. R. F. Kuang) and Nebula Awards Showcase 58 (ed. Stephen Kotowych).
Enhancing Image
The year is 2091, and Grace, a normal girl about to turn 18, has a big problem in the form of an unwanted pregnancy. She had sex with her maybe-boyfriend before he goes away and now her rabbit test (not a test actually involving a rabbit) has come up positive. This would be bad enough on its own, but the America of 2091 is (at least in some ways) even worse off than today, with women’s menstrual cycles being tracked by an app, courtesy of Rabbit Test LMC. Of course, parents can watch over their underage daughters’ cycles like hawks, and this is all in the aftermath of a nationwide ban on abortion. Grace’s only real hope is to go to her friend Sal to mess with the app, causing a “blackout” long enough for Grace to procure some illicit abortion pills from “one of those old ladies who sells pill packs out of their closets, hoarded up from before the ban.” If she can get this thing taken care of without her Jesus-freak mom finding out then all will be well, more or less. Of course, things don’t go that way.
Grace’s story only takes up about half of “Rabbit Test,” with the other half being a mix of real facts, narratives, and fictionalized vignettes that feed into the greater narrative about reproductive rights. To give Mills credit in a couple ways, she evidently spent much of her time (about a month, by her estimates) on the story by doing research, taking a crash course in the history of abortion, forcing miscarriages, pregnancy tests, and so on. That this is all readable while also being crammed into just over 7,000 words is in itself an achievement, although it’s about one step away from simply copy-pasting passages from actual research papers into your SF short story. What makes this all more impressive is that Mills is taking an intersectional feminist approach, plus a somewhat Marx-inspired understanding of historical forces, to make connections you probably wouldn’t make on your own; indeed these sections, kept away from the Grace narrative, are the closest “Rabbit Test” comes to letting the reader think for themself. We get, in a surprisingly short number of words, a brief history of methods for testing pregnancy, going from mice and rabbits to frogs, of women across different cultures and time periods using at-home methods of testing for pregnancy and (if the desire be there) forcing a miscarriage. It becomes clear that the issue of women’s reproductive rights is one that connects race and class conflict, as well as misogyny, perhaps the oldest of mankind’s evils against itself. This sounds like a lot, because it is.
Meanwhile, Grace comes close to getting what she needs through a trans man named Ambrose (“Women aren’t the only people worried about their uteruses, and Ambrose saw the writing on the wall long before the 2084 ban passed.”), but it’s too late. Sal has ratted her out, apparently being unable to keep her mouth shut, and to say Grace’s mom is unhappy about all this would be an understatement. Grace is gonna have the baby, whether she wants to or not. I would feel more about this if we only barely got to know Grace as a person, and if Amelia, Grace’s mom, wasn’t a caricature of the sort you’d find in Stephen King’s writing.
Get this:
Amelia is marching because she fears being outnumbered. She’s marching because she believes it’s her duty to save babies and place them in homes with good Christian values, because the scientific establishment is out of control, a cabal of demons on Earth locking an entire generation out of salvation.
On the one hand yes, there are people like Amelia in America today—at least several million, going by polls. This doesn’t make her any less of a cartoon character. Then again, nobody is allowed much development or interiority in “Rabbit Test,” since this isn’t that kind of story and goddamnit, we only have 7,000 words and change to get through everything. It’s effective shorthand on Mills’s part for letting us know Grace’s mom is a raving lunatic and that we should be worried about Grace’s safety, but it’s just that. Maybe the biggest message take from all this is that so many people, especially queer people (hey, at least Grace is straight and cis, as far as we know), would be better off if they moved out of their parents’ house as soon as possible. I’m being serious here, as someone whose mental health improved exponentially (putting the bouts of depression I still get aside) once I got a place of my own. Unfortunately, Grace don’t got the means.
When I criticize Mills, just know that a part of me does feel bad, for at least two reasons: the first is that I can respect her rather far-left interpretation of history, as it’s one I more or less agree with. Then again, you might say I’m biased for that reason, and for my part I honestly can’t imagine any “pro-life” person reading “Rabbit Chest” and being convinced by Mills’s argument. The second reason is that if I wanted a story with this message to be more to my liking, I would basically be demanding a different kind of story almost altogether, one that leans much more into a show-don’t-tell approach. This is clearly not what Mills had in mind. So, I can take “Rabbit Test” for what it is or I can sit back and think about a quite different story it could’ve been, one which would’ve met my own specific tastes. Which is more fair? But obviously, even if I were to try to be fair all the way, I don’t see myself ever rereading “Rabbit Test” from start to finish. I consider a great short story to be one that the reader can go back to again and again over a span of years, and I’m not sure if Mills intended “Rabbit Test” to be read more than once. Despite the amount of research and talking points, and admittedly some good lines in there, there’s not much reason to go back to it. That’s not what I think of as being a top-tier story.
There Be Spoilers Here
Grace gives birth to a daughter, named Olivia, and eventually the two move out from under Amelia’s scornful gaze and get an apartment of their own. Despite having been desperate to abort her years earlier, Grace has come to love and care for her daughter, despite the two of them living on meager means. Unfortunately, almost as if like clockwork, disaster strikes again. It’s strongly implied that the teenaged Olivia got drugged and raped at a party, and while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does tend to rhyme. So it goes. The two are able to force a miscarriage, but it comes at a terrible price, as Grace is charged with murder and spends a couple decades in prison—for killing what would’ve been almost indistinguishable from a cat fetus. Finally, the year is 2119, and congress is close to reversing the nationwide abortion ban. We’re told that in the intervening years gay marriage had been banned nationwide, only for that decision to later be reversed. Presumably the same thing will happen with the abortion ban. Hopefully.
The idea is that history works in cycles. Rights that were given at one time can just as easily be taken away in another, and also the other way around. For about half a century we in the US had the nationwide right to abortion, thanks to Roe v. Wade, but now we live in a post-Roe v. Wade world. As Mills says at the end, “it is never over.” Patriarchy and the subjugation of women is such an old human evil that it’s in the Bible, predating capitalism by centuries. Mills ultimately argues that women’s liberation is the omni-cause of human rights, and has been for a long time; but like any good intersectional feminist she knows the fight for women’s liberation ties into capitalism, racism, colonialism, and a few other -isms I’m not mentioning at the moment.
A Step Farther Out
I had read this story a couple days ago, and took some time to sit on it. I feel rather conflicted, because Mills succeeded in writing the kind of story she wanted to write; it’s just that I had wished “Rabbit Test” would be something other than what it is, which I understand is unfair. When I heard all these things about “Rabbit Test” I got the hunch it would be a didactic treatise on abortion rights, and it is indeed that. If anything it’s even more in-your-face than I was expecting. I agree with every point Mills makes here, so I feel like I’m at liberty to say this kind of story-as-treatise method doesn’t work for me. I could be wrong, but I don’t think “Rabbit Test” will be read and enjoyed thirty years from now in the way of, say, Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire” or even Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”—the latter also being on the didactic side and seemingly made in a lab to be forced on English students, but still enjoyable. Even Le Guin, when she’s trying to make a point, leaves enough room for the reader to think on it, so that they feel like they’re collaborating with the author.
See you next time.
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Short Story Review: “The Hungry House” by Robert Bloch
(Cover by Malcolm Smith. Imagination, April 1951.) Who Goes There?
Robert Bloch was something of a prodigy, with his first stories being published professionally when he was still in high school. He was also probably the youngest member of the Lovecraft circle, being correspondents with the man himself in the last few years of the latter’s life, and they were on such good terms that they even dedicated stories to each other. Bloch’s early work very much owed a debt to Lovecraft, but by the early ’40s he had matured into a different kind of horror writer, although mostly he still wrote in the supernatural mode for the rest of his career. This may come as a bit of a surprise to people who only know about Bloch through Psycho, which is horror but not supernatural, although the Bates house is certainly haunted in a metaphorical if not literal sense. Of course, we should not feel too bad for Bloch being known nowadays mostly for a single novel that’s also somewhat uncharacteristic of his oeuvre, since he made some big bucks out of it, and he also wrote for TV on top of his prose fiction, most famously a few spooky-themed Star Trek episodes.
Horror was Bloch’s genre of choice, without question, although he did write SF on occasion, and funnily enough the last Bloch story I reviewed here, “The Movie People,” is fantasy but decidedly not horror. If “The Movie People” was Bloch attempting a sentimental fantasy sort of in the style of Ray Bradbury, then “The Hungry House” sees Bloch on his home turf, and is all the better for it. This is a classic haunted-house story with a morbid ending, which also feels distinctly modern in the sense that it feels like it could’ve only been written no earlier than the 20th century. The haunted-house story has a long lineage, going way back to the days of the original Gothic novel in the late 18th century, and Bloch does just enough here to distinguish his story from its many predecessors.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1951 issue of Imagination. It’s been reprinted a fair number of times, including Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural (ed. Marvin and Saralee Kaye), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Bloch collections Pleasant Dreams—Nightmares, The Best of Robert Bloch, and The Early Fears (Bloch really loved his wordplay).
Enhancing Image
Bloch does something clever from the outset in that he lets us know, in not so plain words, that this is meant to be taken as an allegory, since the protagonists, a married couple, are not given names, simply being referred to as “he” and “she.” The couple had bought a five-year lease on this house, which I’m not sure if this is a thing or not nowadays, since I’m not a homeowner (at least at this time) myself. Normally such a story would start with the couple moving in and discovering, gradually, that something is a bit off about their new home, but we start with the duo already being aware that they have a problem before briefly flashing back to when the trouble started. This is a nice way of getting us quickly up to speed on what kind of story this is, as Bloch seems to know that the reader is probably already familiar with haunted-house narratives; even in 1951 they were kind of old-hat. We also waste no time in being told why the couple can’t just move out, which is always the question one asks with this kind of story. “Why don’t they just leave?” And sell the house to whom? And how do they explain the issue to anyone, even their agent, whom we find out has a secret or two of his own. There’s a degree of self-awareness here that’s both indicative of when “The Hungry House” was written and of how deeply Bloch is familiar with his game. He knows, just as we know, what we’re in for; the question the remains as to the exact execution of it.
He and she’s marriage is tested from the outside, by the fact that their house, or more specifically the mirrors in their house, is haunted. At different points they see a man, a young girl, and an old woman in the reflections of these windows (a window is a kind of mirror, after all) and mirrors. They know something is wrong and yet feel powerless before this ghostly power, doubly so because there’s gonna be a house-warming party that weekend and it’s not like they can make up a good-enough excuse for the guests. Their friends will be coming over, among them being Mr. Hacker, the agent who sold them the house in the first place. (I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a joke that his name is Hacker, being that he sold the house on a lie by way of omission.) The ensuing party sequence, in which we’re introduced to a bunch of well-dressed urbanites, reads like it could belong in literary fiction of the time, or SF that was being printed in Galaxy. This is a story about people who think rather highly of themselves, and are prone to follies we tend to associate with the upper-middle class, namely vanity and a pervasive itch to escape boredom. Bloch explicitly mentions the myth of Narcissus more than once, although an unspoken influence is no doubt The Picture of Dorian Gray, especially once we hear about the house’s backstory. A basic flaw with “The Hungry House,” which sadly is a weak spot with Bloch’s writing generally, is that it leans into misogyny, to the point where the misogynistic element is part of the story’s DNA. We even get the “Woman, thy name is vanity!” line, so that while people of either gender are susceptible to it in-story, Bloch also makes it out to be a decidedly feminine flaw.
As is similarly the case with Psycho, all this trouble started because of a bitchy old woman. This house used to belong to the Bells, with Joe Bell building it back in “the sixties” (I have to think the 1860s), with his wife dying in childbirth and him being left to care for his daughter Laura. Laura grows up to be a wealthy spinster who stays young for decades, or at least appears to stay young, with the help of the mirrors in the house. She becomes so obsessed with her own beauty that she locks herself away from even her servants to focus on herself. However, when one of the servants breaks a mirror (dying in the process, although Laura doesn’t mind that part so much), the magic breaks as well, with Laura seeing herself as a horribly aged woman. (See what I mean by the Dorian Gray influence?) In despair she commits suicide, cutting her throat on the broken glass. The woman may have died in body, but apparently not in spirit, since she continues to be mistress of the manor years after her death. A few people, including a little girl who had gone missing, have met bad ends coming to this house. There’s some ambiguity as to how much the house has direct control over the people inside it and how much of it is merely illusion—you might say a trick of the light, thanks to the haunted reflections. The reflections are haunted, that much is certain, but Bloch (I think wisely) leaves it up to interpretation as to how much control Laura has over the house’s architecture. Granted that I don’t think it’s a very scary story, there’s enough cleverness and escalation of tension here to suffice.
There Be Spoilers Here
Hacker and the other party guests leave shaken but otherwise unscathed, but “he” and “she” are not so lucky. Part of me was hoping we would get a happy or even bittersweet ending, but I suppose it had to end this way. To give Our Heroes™ some credit, they make the bright decision that breaking all the mirrors in the house would at least nerf Laura’s power, although (of course) it turns out they had forgotten about one important thing: you can find your reflection in more than just mirrors and windows. Laura’s power lurks in any reflection, including water, and even a pool of fresh blood. It’s predictable, especially for Bloch, who has a soft spot for this kind of morbid conclusion, but I do like how the water pipe bursting could be taken as either a freak accident that just so happens to benefit Laura or something she willed to happen. There’s a raw paranoia here that heightens the story’s scare factor, even if structurally it’s easy enough to figure out in advance, because the villain can work through damn near anything and nothing that can reflect one’s face is to be trusted.
A Step Farther Out
I’ll be honest, when I heard of “The Hungry House” I thought it’d be about a house that literally eats people, but thankfully this turned out not to be the case. Oh sure, the house consumes people, in a kind of metaphorical sense, but it’s more of an old-school haunted-house narrative with that trademark touch of modern self-awareness that Bloch is known for. It may read as a bit creaky and predictable today, but this would not have been so much the case back in 1951. What I can’t help but think about is that Bloch, who remained a regular at Weird Tales until its demise (well, its first demise) in 1953, could not get “The Hungry House” published there, but instead went to the ostensibly SF-focused Imagination, which may or may not have paid as well. I wonder why that happened.
See you next time.
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Things Beyond: October 2025
(Cover by Wayne Barlowe. Asimov’s, June 1984.) There’s something about October that brings a change in me. It could be that autumn has now unambiguously started, as opposed to just going by the autumnal equinox. The weather is now colder and dryer. My hands and nose are getting dry, the latter occasionally resulting in a nosebleed. I now feel like I can put on a hoodie and jog around the city. The trees will start being stripped of their leaves. Overall it’s a time of changes, mostly for the better. October is also the month of Halloween, which is far and away my favorite holiday, to the point where it might the only one I really get festive about. Now is the time for watching horror movies, from the classices to some grade-A schlock. Time to catch up on some horror reads I’ve accumulated on my shelf. Time for pumpkin spice lattes, if you’re into that. In other words, this is for me what Christmastime is for some people—mind you that I tend to get depressed around Christmas.
For this month we’re back to reviews at regular intervals, all short stories, all featuring thrills, chills, and assorted horrors. For the first time in a while I’m actually excited with what I’m gonna be writing about. Hopefully you’ll be joining me in reading at least a few of these.
We have one story from the 1940s, three from the ’50s, three from the ’80s, one from the ’90s, and one from the 2020s.
For the short stories:
- “The Hungry House” by Robert Bloch. From the April 1951 issue of Imagination. Bloch was correspondents with H. P. Lovecraft when the former was still in high school, and this friendship had an apparent influence on Bloch’s early fiction. While he’s most famous for writing Psycho, which is non-supernatural horror, most of Bloch’s work involves ghouls, cosmic horrors, and whatnot.
- “Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills. From the November-December 2022 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, being only the third story ever to win all three. Mills debuted in 2016, with her debut novel published in 2024. “Rabbit Test” was the last of a streak of short stories, as Mills stopped writing short fiction for three years.
- “Punishment Without Crime” by Ray Bradbury. From the March 1950 issue of Other Worlds Science Fiction. Being one of the most famous American authors ever, it can be easy to forget that Bradbury started writing for the genre magazines, not all of them being of the first rate. He also wrote so much horror early in his career that only a fraction of it appeared in The October Country.
- “Lost Memory” by Peter Phillips. From the May 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. I had ever heard of Peter Phillips before, which might be because he was only active for a short time, from about 1948 to 1958. He stopped writing SF for reasons I’m not sure of. He was also British, at a time when there weren’t too many active in the field, even appearing in the inaugural issue of New Worlds.
- “Yellowjacket Summer” by Robert McCammon. From the October 1986 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. McCammon made his debut in 1978, but it took him a bit to come to the forefront of contemporary horror fiction. His massive post-apocalyptic novel Swan Song tied for the inaugural Stoker for Best Novel. Disillusionment with the industry made him step away from writing for a decade.
- “Bloodchild” by Octavia E. Butler. From the June 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Winner of the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novelette. This is a reread for me, but I’ve been meaning to return to it for a close read for a minute. Butler wrote only maybe a dozen short stories, but they’ve received a disproportinate amount of praise, with her winning Hugos for short fiction twice consecutively.
- “Reckoning” by Kathe Koja. From the July 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Koja debuted in the late ’80s with a pretty strong string of short stories before her debut novel, The Cipher, hit stores in 1991. She was a formiddable horror talent in the ’90s, but in the 2000s onward took to writing novels aimed at young readers, and she hasn’t written much generally lately.
- “Day of Judgment” by Edmond Hamilton. From the September 1946 issue of Weird Tales. While he’s most known as a pioneer of space opera, as well as his Captain Future series, Hamilton appeared frequently in Weird Tales from the beginning of his career, sometimes with SF but also sometimes with fantasy and horror. He was an old-school pulp writer in that he wrote for basically any market.
- “The Pear-Shaped Man” by George R. R. Martin. From the October 1987 issue of Omni. Winner of the Stoker for Best Long Fiction. Martin is a case where a series (A Song of Ice and Fire) of his is so famous that it overshadows the rest of his work, which mind you is considerable. Martin’s gone on record as thinking of himself as instincively a horror writer, a fact which is on display here.
We have pretty much an all-star cast of authors here, so I hope this will help my recent writing slump. Of course, the most important thing is that we have fun with this. Happy Halloween.
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Serial Review: Under Pressure by Frank Herbert (Part 3/3)
(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Astounding, January 1956.) The Story So Far
John Ramsey is a gifted psychologist on an assignment from Bu-Psych, to play the role of the new electronics officer for the Fenian Ram, a subtug that’s out to raid oil in enemy territory, just off Siberia. This is the 21st century, and not only has the Cold War gotten a bit warmer, but oil has become an increasingly precious resource. The last twenty subtug missions have ended in failure, with the higher-ups suspecting there are “sleepers” aboard these submarines—spies who are sabotaging things from the inside. Ramsey’s job is twofold: to sniff out a possible spy among the Ram‘s small crew, and to evaluate Sparrow, the Ram‘s captain. Sparrow has been shown to be an incredible captain, but he also seems to have a bit of a screw loose, being a Bible-spouting borderline psychotic who expects nothing less than the utmost devotion from his crew. The other crew are Bonnett and Garcia, who’ve been on the Ram for many months by now. Ramsey is an outsider here, which already puts him at a disadvantage, never mind that he has to keep his real profession a secret.
Another problem is that being in a submarine means there’s no such thing as a minor accident, especially when it comes to dealing with enemy patrols. Of course the Ram is totally outmanned and outgunned against the wolf packs that are patrolling the Pacific, so the only option is evasive action. After a close call with the enemy, Sparrow falls ill from radiation sickness for a time, meanwhile the rest of the crew are unsure as to where they stand with each other. There’s the growing sense that somebody here is a spy, and the cards are stacked against Ramsey since he’s fresh meat. For better or worse Garcia has also figured out that Ramsey is a psychologist who has some ulterior motive for hopping aboard the Ram. The two have a kind of mutual respect, if also ambivalence mixed with paranoia. The last installment ended with Bonnett, having misconstrued Ramsey helping with the ship for planting a “spybeam,” jumping the gun and beating Ramsey within an inch of his life. Does this mean Bonnett is really the spy? Is everyone a little too tightly wound with this mission? I would know the answers, considering I’ve read the final installment or else I wouldn’t be here.
Enhancing Image
Surprise! Turns out Garcia is the spy, although how this is revealed is a bit odd; I don’t mean this in a bad way. Prior to the actual reveal Garcia implies, in a conversation with Ramsey, that he’s become tired of working for the Soviets, or more accurately he’s become tired of being a spy, but also knows that it’s too late to turn back now. If he’s caught then he would be tried and most likely executed for espionage. Interestingly, Herbert would’ve written Under Pressure in the wake of the Rosenbergs being tried and executed as spies, which in the age of McCarthyism was a major blow to civil liberties in the US. There was a crackdown on those suspected of having Soviet or generally leftist sentiments, and while Herbert was not a leftist at all, he held a long-standing disdain for government. Garcia is technically the closest thing the novel has to a villain, by virtue of being on the Soviets’ payroll, and yet Herbert writes him sympathetically. I’m not totally sure how this flew over John W. Campbell’s head, given that Campbell was a committed hawk during the Cold War and Under Pressure is evidently ambivalent about the conflict. It’s not unusual to find SF from the era that takes a rather neutral or ambivalent stance on the Cold War, but that’s usually reserved for stuff published in other magazines, and there’s a moral greyness here that is not often seen in SF published in Astounding at the time. I have to admit I didn’t expect that from Herbert.
Of course, stuck between either dying in the Ram or being taken back to the States for the gas chamber, Garcia opts for the former, dying from a heavy dose of radiation, with the wish that his family at least be provided for after his death. Sparrow, a man who prays for the souls of his enemies even as he goes up against them in battle, takes Garcia up on this, although we’re told at the end that the government killed two birds with one stone by giving Garcia’s widow a position so that they can keep an eye on her. There’s a touch of cynicism in what is otherwise a happy ending—just enough to satisfy Herbert’s own tendency toward cynicism, but not enough to scare Campbell. As for Sparrow, there’s a curious insight about how he’s psychologically unfit to live on land, but perfectly adapted to life in a submarine, in the sense that he’s married to the job. What counts as being mentally unfit? It’s a matter of perspective. Sparrow is so attached to the Ram that it’s like a second skin, or like his natural environment. I’ve noticed that in the years leading up to the space race escalating, there was some speculation in SF about the psychology of the astronaut, and how an astronaut might be changed mentally by life in a tin can, in zero gravity; but Herbert posits the same question about people who work in submarines, a question that has only become more pertinent with the invention of long-range nuclear subs. You don’t see this specific kind of speculation often in fiction.
A Step Farther Out
Only been, what, a couple weeks since I last posted here? Feels like it hasn’t been that long on my end. Then again, I was posting every few days here up until recently, and since I can look at the numbers, I can tell you that I’ve written a lot for this site. A fair bit of time and effort with relatively few returns, except of course the pleasure of (sometimes) reading fiction that is in itself enjoyable. I’m nothing if not a compulsive reader; in fact while I’ve mostly taken a break this month from writing, I never stopped reading, say, two or three books at a time.
Well, Under Pressure is a pretty decent serial, to the point where I can see how reviewers in 1956 saw it as an impressive debut from Herbert. For his part Herbert wouldn’t properly follow up Under Pressure (or The Dragon in the Sea as it’s also called) for nearly a decade, but when he did it would be the beginning of maybe the single most famous SF book series of all time. I do recommend Under Pressure if you’re into old-school hard SF that has also aged better than a lot of stuff from that time period, although your mileage may vary with regards to Herbert’s writing quirks, some of which are very much present here.
See you next time.
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Serial Review: Under Pressure by Frank Herbert (Part 2/3)
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, December 1955.) The Story So Far
John Ramsey is a gifted psychologist, part of the Bureau of Psychology, who’s given the unenviable assignment of surveying the crew of the subtug Fenian Ram, and especially its captain. Captain Sparrow is on the one hand the master of his ship, and his performance on the job has been off the charts; but he’s also a Christmonger, and the higher-ups fear he might be a little too unhinged. Meanwhile there’s also the suspicion that there’s a spy aboard the submarine, which is a bit odd considering the crew (minus Ramsey) is a total of three men, all of whom have known each other for months. Still. Ramsey takes a crash course in a submarine’s layout and becomes the fourth crewman, as the new electronics officer. (The last one had lost his mind.) Of course, Ramsey’s job as psychologist is kept secret from the others, as well as the fact that he’s here to sniff out a potential rat. You have Captain Sparrow as well as Bonnett and Garcia, with Bonnett being Sparrow’s right-hand man and Garcia being a practicing but rather pessimistic Catholic. Sparrow is fond of spouting prayers and Bible verses, to the point where if I were in Ramsey’s position I would just assume the man was totally psychotic. But that’s just me. There is indeed a whiff of religious mania in the air, but rather than immediately cause problems this instead constributes to a kind of synergy among the three crewmen. Ramsey is the odd one out; his contributions to the team add a degree of tension presumably not there before, and what’s worse is that at one point Ramsey comes to the realization that he’s afraid of being underwater.
While set in the 21st century, actually around the same time as [current year], Under Pressure takes place in a world where the Cold War has gone a bit hot and East and West and battling under the seas for control of oil. Frank Herbert seems to have a fondness for narratives about factions fighting over a precious resource. The Fenian Ram is a top-performing subtug, and she’ll need to be considering the previous twenty subs that have been on this raid have failed—indeed destroyed. We’re in the depths of the sea, off the coast of Siberia, in enemy territory, where Soviet wolf packs have been picking off American subs and, the top brass suspects, there may be a spy sabotaging these subs. For some reason damn near every SF writer in the business at the time thought the Cold War would go on for a century or more, with the exception of John Brunner and one or two others. Sure, the Cold War lasted a while, but it seems nobody had speculated that the Soviet Union would dissolve as early as it did.
Enhancing Image
Much of the first installment is concerned with setting up the context for this undersea voyage, as well as the crew. Now that we’ve become acclimated it’s time for some sweet submarine-on-submarine action, of the sort you may have seen watching Das Boot. (I’m sorry that I’ve mentioned that movie more than once at this point, but in my defense, it is the gold standard for the niche subgenre that is submarine media.) The second installment is a lot heavier on action, which ironically means there’s a lot less for me to talk about. If you’ve been reading my posts for at least a few months then you know I’m not very good at writing about action, nor am I even good at recapping what happens. When it comes to reading fiction I’m about ideas, characters, dialogue, and individual moments, which is probably why I’ve been a Thomas Pynchon fan since college. (Try not to hold that against me.) Thankfully, while he does have weaknesses as a writer (his tendency to jump from one character’s internal monologue to another without pause can be grating at times, and he was by no means a poet), Herbert has a talent for giving what is at least on paper a simple scenario a layer of complexity. Think about it: we’re stuck in this submarine for most of the novel, and with a small set of characters the whole time, none of whom are all that likable. Like sure, Ramsey is not as suspect as the others, but that’s because a) he’s the protagonist, b) he really does wanna do the right thing, and c) he’s not a Jesus freak. Even while these characters are prone to bickering and having tirades, it’s a setting that perfectly calls for such things. When a close call with some enemy subs leads to Sparrow getting a case of radiation sickness and lying in the infirmary for a time, you get the sense that while it wouldn’t happen at this point, if only for the sake of the plot, it’s very possible that a freak incident can leave this little ship without a captain. Everything can go to hell in a second, and it nearly does.
Things are tense while Sparrow is recovering, and even when he resumes control the situation doesn’t lighten any. It becomes apparent to everyone that one of them is probably out to sabotage the subtug, so that there are always two people awake to keep watch on each other. (It does not occur to them, of course, that there could be two spies.) The first revelation is that Garcia has somehow found out that Ramsey is a psychologist and not really an electronics officer by trade, even calling him a “head thumper.” This sparks an uneasy agreement between them, because it would be inconvenient for Sparrow especially to discover that Ramsey’s been sent here to check his head. The second revelation comes at the very end of the installment when Bonnett, having been roused into zealotry by Sparrow and convinced Ramsey is suspect, misunderstands the situation and almost punches Ramsey’s lights out before the latter can even get a word in. Something I have to say about Under Pressure that I usually don’t get to say about SF of this vintage is that I’m really not sure how this is supposed to play out in the final act. All three men are suspect in some way, and of course Ramsey himself could be secretly working for the other side, although I would be much peeved if that were the case considering we’ve been given insight into his thought processes. At that point I’d feel like Herbert was cheating. This also goes for Sparrow, to a lesser extent, since he’s the other character whose internal monologue we’re let in on throughout the novel. Herbert is rather inconsistent about how much attention each man’s internal monologue gets and at what points we’re allowed to read their thoughts, which is a problem that would haunt Herbert for decades.
A Step Farther Out
I had actually read this installment about a week ago, but didn’t feel motivated to write about it until recently. You’d think giving myself time to focus on other things would mean that at some point I’d be really itching to hop back on the horse that is writing, but this is not so. The problem with writing is that in order to be effective you have to work at it at least somewhat regularly or else you will lose the touch, so in that way it’s like how you ought to hit the gym at least a few days a week. I also seem to have not gained any extra insight into what Herbert’s doing with this novel, which I might add is looking to be a pretty solid debut novel, since I finished this installment. My initial thoughts and feelings didn’t change or expand, which disappointed me. It was just a matter of sitting down for a couple hours and pushing out some words. Don’t worry, I’ll have finished reviewing this serial by the end of the month.
See you next time.
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Things Beyond: September 2025
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, December 1955.) It could be that I’ve simply had too much on my plate, or that I’ve been procrastinating with my projects, but I’ve been feeling sluggish and unfulfilled with my writing as of late. Even in writing this forecast post I feel… uninspired. The drive is not currently in me. Actually the drive has not been there for several days now, which hasn’t stopped me from getting a couple things done. There is a difference, however, between writing like you’re in the midst of a fever and writing as a kind of chore, and it’s felt like the latter too often as of late.
So, I figured it was time I take a break from this site for a month, for the most part. I will still be finishing my review of Under Pressure, and will be writing one or two editorials over the course of this month, but otherwise I’ll stepping away from here momentarily. I have too much going on, and I feel as if I’m the verge of utterly burning myself out with how productive I’ve tried to be, even with missing a couple deadlines. (I might still write a review of The Sorcerer’s Ship sometime this month, but needless to say I could not even start my review, let alone have it posted, yesterday.) I continue to write, often without motivation or imagination, because I really feel like I can’t do anything else. Writers, as opposed to people who write, are like actors, in that they do what they do because they feel helpless or impotent when it comes to other talents. I’m a writer. Unfortunately I don’t even make money from writing, as it stands; maybe if I were to train myself to write fiction, to be published in some of the magazines I take material from for this very site, then I could make some money on top of my meager earnings from my day job. Considering how things are going, it could be that in time I might not even have a choice. I might have to branch out into fiction, and take even more time away from this site, because I might have to do it. But who knows, it might be fulfilling in its own right.
Sometimes I feel like a pastor in an empty church, or with only a few congregates, plus the rats and pigeons. Who am I speaking to? I don’t have much of an audience, and some of the people who say they read my stuff are themselves bloggers, also concerned with traffic for their own projects. It’s a problem that SFF fandom has had for a long time, and I don’t see any way of fixing it. Most fans I know don’t engage with this sort of thing. A lot of people who vote in the fan categories, when it comes time for the Hugos each year, are themselves fan writers, artists, etc. We’re voting for each other. I’m speaking to people who know what it’s like, which is both a good and bad thing. I feel so horribly alone, most of the time, and the time and energy I put into this hobby sometimes only worsen the loneliness and anxiety. I had started this site three years ago as a way to cope with some mental health struggles, but it doesn’t always help.
So I’m taking a break this month, for the most part. There will be a few posts, but I aside from Under Pressure and maybe The Sorcerer’s Ship I don’t feel like writing about any magazine fiction until next month. Maybe I deserve a break like this, but mostly I just feel that I need it. I won’t be entirely gone, so don’t miss me too much.
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Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 