Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Short Story Review: “The End of the Party” by Graham Greene

February 25th, 2025

(Cover by Paul Callé. Worlds Beyond, December 1950.)

Who Goes There?

To say today’s author is an outsider to the field might be an understatement. Graham Greene was one of the most beloved English writers of the mid-20th century, even being nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times. He’s known chiefly for his novels, which he divided into two groups: the serious (often Catholic-themed) novels and the “entertainments.” The former could be entertaining and the latter could at times be deceptively serious; they were not really mutually exclusive. You get the sense that The Power and the Glory and Our Man in Havana were written by the same man, despite them being in some ways very different novels. Greene was an atheist in his adolescence but converted to Catholicism when he was in college, making him one of the few adult Catholic converts who isn’t a fucking weirdo about it. Despite his strong sense of metaphysics and moral seriousness, he was at the very least a fellow traveler when it came to leftist politics, a fact that, given the Church’s allying with several fascist regimes, made his relationship with his faith a fascinatingly complicated one. Similarly today’s story, which Greene wrote in 1929, and which was apparently a personal favorite of his despite being from so early in his career, has a touch of religion about it; but if so, it’s a dark touch, showing Greene at his most cruel. “The End of the Party” isn’t exactly a supernatural horror story, although its uncanniness does push it at least to the borderline, if not there outright.

Placing Coordinates

“The End of the Party” was first published in The London Mercury in 1932, before being reprinted in the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond. It has since been reprinted in Children of Wonder: 21 Remarkable and Fantastic Tales (ed. William Tenn), The Sixth Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories (ed. Mary Danby), The Light Fantastic: Science Fiction Classics from the Mainstream (ed. Harry Harrison), Perchance to Dream (ed. Damon Knight), among others, along with the Greene collections Twenty-One Stories and Complete Short Stories. This story, being one of Greene’s most popular out of his short fiction, is not exactly hard to find.

Enhancing Image

Peter and Francis Morton are identical twin brothers, both ten years old, and while they do look very similar, they are in other ways very different. Peter is the “normal” one, while Francis seems to have lagged behind in terms of maturity—or perhaps it’s something else. Despite his age, at which points children would be more courageous, Francis is still deathly afraid of the dark, and even has a nurse chaperone him, which is embarrassing for someone his age. He also doesn’t understand social interactions very well, especially with those of the opposite sex. Girls make him uneasy, which is not by itself unusual, except he doesn’t seem to do much better with people of his own gender. Speaking of uneasiness, we know from the opening scene that something bad is on the horizon, because Francis had a dream that he was dead. And today is the yearly party at Mrs. Henne-Falcon’s place. Both brothers dread this, although Francis more so, given he has to suffer more directly. It’s at this party, every year, that the adults turn off all the lights and the children play a game of hide-and-seek. Peter doesn’t like this, if only because it scares his brother so much.

[Francis’s] cheeks still bore the badge of a shameful memory, of the game of hide and seek last year in the darkened house, and of how he had screamed when Mabel Warren put her hand suddenly upon his arm. He had not heard her coming. Girls were like that. Their shoes never squeaked. No boards whined under the tread. They slunk like cats on padded claws.

Francis feigns ill, but his parents don’t buy it. They’re all going to the party, because it’s one of those family obligations. It’s like if you hate weddings, but oh a relative of yours is getting married so you “have” to goooo. It’s horrible. This is the kind of horror that would most strongly work on people who find themselves in either Francis or Peter’s shoes, which is to say I found it a pretty effective exercise in escalating dread. This story is nearly a century old, and I haven’t been officially diagnosed myself, but Francis is very likely autistic. He might also have some kind of PTSD. The two are not mutually exclusive. There is something not right about the boy. On the one hand Greene is clearly setting up a bad fate for Francis, but he also writes him from a just as clearly empathetic standpoint, as if Greene understands the boy’s anxieties and that the act of writing this story was also an act of sado-masochism. It must have hurt to write it, but at the same time it might’ve been a kind of pain that really does strengthen one’s own character (unlike most pain, which is “malignantly useless”), hence I think why Greene continued to have a soft spot for it. “The End of the Party,” which mind you Greene would’ve written when he was only 24 or 25, marked a bit of a turning point for him as a writer.

Like a lot of great short stories, “The End of the Party” is loaded with details, some of which are arguably problematic. There’s a pervasive misogyny that’s baked into the narrative, both what happens and the symbolism behind it, such that it only makes sense as a story when one considers the misogynistic elements. With the exception of the nurse, who, like Peter, serves to keep Francis out of danger, every other female character acts as an antagonist, including the twin boys’ own mother, who tells Francis that he “must go” (italics mine) to the party, with “the cold confidence of a grown-up’s retort.” The young girls who will be at the party, who are up to a few years older than the boys, are even more scornful. And then there’s Mrs. Henne-Falcon, whose very name is somehow a combination of two birds, a hen and a falcon—both a “gossiping hen” and a bird of prey. Danger. Greene is a great writer, maybe one of the best of the 20th century, so it’s no surprise that even when his ends might be disagreeable, the means are usually not. He knows what he’s doing. You could, of course, reason that since this story is told from the perspective of two young boys (the exact perspective shifts back and forth between Francis and Peter), the misogyny should be assumed to be more a flaw of the characters than the author; and after all, having been raised as a boy myself, I can tell you that boys, almost without exception, hold a strong primordial distrust toward girls.

There is also the context in which Greene wrote “The End of the Party,” it being subtextually a post-war narrative. Something to remember about World War I is that there was a profound difference in post-war experiences between the American and British sides, the Americans, having barely fought in the war to begin with, having come out of it relatively unscathed; but for the British it was a very different story. Greene was born in 1904, so he was too young to have served, even if he wanted to, but he grew up in the shadow of a generation of damaged men—the ones who had come out of the war alive, that is. He could not understand too vividly the sufferings of the generation of British men that preceded him, so with this story he did something rather intriguing and profound, in that he seemed to transfer some of that war trauma to the generation that came after him. Remember that Francis and Peter are ten years old, and assuming the story takes place roughly when it was written, this means they would have been born very shortly after the end of World War I. While the war, to my recollection, never comes up directly in-story, something big hangs over the boys’ heads—something much bigger than just awkward social interaction. Of course, for someone neurodivergent like Francis, awkward social interaction might well represent what World War I represented for a lot of people during that war’s duraction: the apocalypse.

There Be Spoilers Here

The party happens and so does the game of hide-and-seek, and there’s no way Francis can get out of it, as if fate has ordered this series of events. Or maybe God did it. God comes up a few times in this little story, and if the God of Abraham does exist (as Greene believed), then He seems to have it out for Francis, and for no discernable reason. Francis’s destiny, be it for good or ill, will not be deferred. Of course, this all could’ve been prevented had the adults taken Francis’s disability into consideration, but, having forced him to be like the neurotypical kids they’ve tried to fit a round peg in a square hole. It’s during the game that Peter and Francis, after having been separated, are reunited, although they can’t see each other. It’s also at this point, during the story’s climax, that the perspective shifts back to Peter, after having us mostly be stuck with Francis. If you’ve read the story then you may have already forgotten that we were in Peter’s shoes at the very beginning, and so here we are again at the end. There’s a reason for this. Peter sees his brother as a reflection of himself, both physically and symbolically. Peter finds Francis in hiding and touches his brother’s face, which is how he knows it’s him, before taking Francis’s hand in his. Francis doesn’t say anything after this point, not even after the game has ended and the lights have come back on—because he’s dead. He died, apparently from sheer fright, when he felt Peter’s hand on his face, as if it were the hand of God which emerged from the blackness. Peter would’ve noticed something was wrong sooner, but he’s so intimately connected with his twin, as if there were a psychic link between them, that he could not at first separate the two.

Peter continued to hold the clenched fingers in an arid and puzzled grief. It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self-pity why it was that the pulse of his brother’s fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more darkness.

Not that there are many happy endings in Greene’s fiction, but this is surely one of the bleakest and unsettling.

A Step Farther Out

Greene struggled with mental illness throughout his life, namely depression, which I think often shows through in his novels; but with “The End of the Party,” one of his most reprinted short stories, it’s like a tiny but all-devouring neutron star. It’s a black hole of pessimism, on almost a cosmic scale despite its small size. I was under the impression, going in, that this was a ghost story, although it ended up not being that; actually it doesn’t even have any overt supernatural elements to speak of. What it does have is a strong sense of the uncanny, and of impending doom. It’s a story of two young boys, both of whom are troubled, each in his own way, who have spent their whole lives by each other’s side up to this point, until suddenly they’re separated, as if God had cut the tape between them with a pair of scissors. It’s scary, but also tragic. I love it.

See you next time.
Serial Review: A Story of the Days to Come by H. G. Wells (Part 1/2)

February 22nd, 2025

(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, April 1928.)

Who Goes There?

Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 and died in 1946, just short of his 80th birthday but just long enough to have seen the end of World War II. Wells is one of the most important writers of SF to have ever lived—maybe the most important. To be an SF fan and not read at least a bit of H. G. Wells would be like being a horror fan and not having read any H. P. Lovecraft, or being an English major and not engaging with Shakespeare or the King James translation of the Bible at all: it’s basically unthinkable. Wells’s influence is made more remarkable when you consider that SF was by no means the only genre he wrote in, although his non-SF work has been thrown into the dustbin of history, and also that he wrote pretty much all of his most important work in the field in the span of about a decade, between 1895 and 1905. While he was still writing, albeit very little SF at this point, in the 1920s, Wells’s presence in the earliest genre magazines, namely Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, was entirely through reprints. Indeed he seemed to appear in nearly every issue of Amazing Stories while Hugo Gernsback had control of that magazine. A Story of the Days to Come was first published in 1899 as five related stories, which then became its chapters. This is a novella, about as long as The Time Machine, but it’s nowhere near as well-known as Wells’s most famous novels or even short stories, I suspect because while it’s certainly ambitious, it lacks the iconic characters, ideas, and even plot momentum of those other works. This is a story that will be rather hard to talk about in terms of plot beats, so that, combined with depression (it took me nearly an hour to get out of bed this morning), made writing about this story a bit of a challenge.

Placing Coordinates

First published as five stories in 1899, in Pall Mall Magazine. It was then serialized in the April and May 1928 issues of Amazing Stories. It’s also been reprinted in The Science Fiction Century (ed. David G. Hartwell) and the Wells collections Tales of Space and Time and The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells. Tales of Space and Time has been in the public domain since forever, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

We start with less of a character and more of an archetype, in the form of Mr. Morris, of the late Victorian era, and his distant descendant, Mwres, who are both perfectly conservative and upstanding men of their times and shared place—that being London of the 19th and 22nd centuries, respectively. Morris/Mwres is totally unconscious about class, cares nothing for the poor, attends church regularly but without passion, and can hardly be bothered to read anything. Indeed Mwres uses a “phonograph,” which here functions like a laptop or audiobook, to consume information, rather than reading the newspapers like his ancestor. Nobody reads anymore. Mwres meets with a hypnotist so that he might do something about his daughter Elizabeth, who is 18 at the story’s beginning and thus of marrying age. Mwres wants Elizabeth married off to a colleague of his, Bindon, a much older man, “plain little man, you know, and a bit unpleasant in some of his ways, but an excellent fellow really.” But Elizabeth, being a romantic and having indulged in many “romances” (tales of adventure), has set her sights on Denton, “a mere attendant upon the stage on which the flying-machines from Paris alight,” who like Elizabeth is a romantic in a future society which has all but abandoned things like poetry and romance of the lovey-dovey sort. Also, both Elizabeth and Denton can read and write, which bothers Mwres. The hypnotist thus messes with Elizabeth mind such that she forgets all about the young man she’s so smitten with, and it’s up to Denton to figure out why his girlfriend doesn’t recognize him the next time the two of them cross paths and how to undo the hypnotism.

As you can see, this is rather satirical. Morris/Mwres is a obviously dig at the conformist, or the “moderate conservative,” someone who might vote Labour but only so long as the party doesn’t get too woke. Wells was a socialist; more specifically he was a Fabian, or what we’d now call a democratic socialist. He was also a technophile, although his feelings on the possibility of technological progress bettering mankind soured as he grew older. Even in A Story of the Days to Come there’s an ambivalence about technology’s place in human progress, although as we’ll see, the “primitivist” option is also shown to be inadequate. If anything tech is shown to be more or less neutral here, more a tool that worsens an already-existing problem—that being the problem of capitalism and class division. This whole fucking plot gets going because the upper-class Mwres, who despite being rich is shown to be an ignoramus, sees the middle-to-lower-class Denton as unfitting for his daughter; and of course Elizabeth has no real say in the matter. Hypnotism, or mesmerism as it was also called at the time, was treated as a big deal in the 19th century, such that in Wells’s story it has become such an advanced practice as to render psychology obsolete. Mind you that psychology as one of the soft sciences was only in its infant stage when Wells wrote A Story of the Days to Come, such that Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams hadn’t even been published yet. The automobile had also not yet become commercially viable enough at the time to be a common presence, and you can sort of feel its absence in this story. Conversely, “flying-machines” have become a preferred mode of commercial travel in-story, despite the first working airplane still being a few years off in the real world. Granted, people had speculated on flying-machines for literally centuries at this point, and Wells would even see the beginnings of commercial flying in his lifetime. My point is that while this story takes place circa 2100, it still reads as if written from the perspective of someone living in 1900—which may very well be the point. The narration, while ostensibly third-person, is very much targeted at a Victorian readership.

This is all intriguing, after the fact, but one issue I had while actually reading A Story of the Days to Come is that from a plotting standpoint this is far from Wells’s best work. A rule of thumb with writing short fiction is that you wanna stick to one perspective: it could be a first-person narrator, or a bird’s-eye-view third-person narrator, but the idea is we should stuck in the head of only one character. You can get away with changing perspectives in a novel, but for short fiction it’s a dangerous game. Wells violates this rule by switching us between at least three perspectives in these first three chapters (the first installment), between the omniscient third-person narrator, Mwres, and Denton. It makes scene and chapter breaks surprisingly confusing, made worse because Mwres and Denton meet the same hypnotist at different points. By the way, it is massively convenient that Denton, after having been dismayed by Elizabeth apparently forgetting all about him, goes to the same hypnotist that Mwres had consulted to brainwash Elizabeth in the first place. Of course Denton uses a little man-handling to get what he wants and make the hyptotist undo the conditioning on Elizabeth, so that the two can be together again—the new problem now being that there’s no going back. They’ve gone against Mwres’s wishes and will not have to live almost like fugitives, since Elizabeth only has as much as what her old man lets her and Denton doesn’t have many prospects of his own. They live at Denton’s place, for a bit, but having become disillusioned with city life, and also being very low on cash, they decide to hit the road and head out to a place very few people live in now: the countryside. It’s a shame Wells didn’t live long enough to have read Clifford Simak’s City, he probably would’ve been very keen on it. Then again, I’m not sure how much SF Wells actually had read, since he seemed irked by the newfangled label.

There Be Spoilers Here

The England of the future is somewhat dystopian, and one way Wells implies this is the fact that “countryside” has mostly been reclaimed by the natural world. Where once there were whole societies of peasantry in the English countryside, now there’s only the stray farmer or shepherd. As with Clifford Simak’s fiction, humanity is shown as being in decline by virtue of having cut itself off from the natural world; man seems to be degrade further the more “unnatural” he becomes. A shepherd meets Denton and Elizabeth as they start their new lives as would-be farmers, and tells them (correctly) that they won’t last long in the countryside; they simply weren’t raised to adapt to this kind of lifestyle. But they do give the whole thing the good old college try, as it were, and honestly the attempt could’ve turned out worse. They both could’ve died easily, between the elements and wild animals; but what finally pushes them to move back to the city is the issue of trespassing, and damn near getting killed by a pack of dogs. (Wells, given his politics, wasn’t keen on private property.) It’s at this point that the first installment ends, with Our Heroes™ having lost the battle, but maybe not the war. We’ll have to wait and see about that. I do wish I cared more about Denton and Elizabeth as people, although obviously I do wanna see them overcome a system that has been built up over generations to keep them apart. With Wells, his characters tend to serve his ideas, rather than the other way around, which is how SF has mostly been written for the past century.

A Step Farther Out

I’m a bit ambivalent about A Story of the Days to Come so far, although David G. Hartwell thought it enough of a hidden gem that he says so in his introduction for it in The Science Fiction Century. The problem is that it works better as almost a fictionalized essay rather than a “story.” Wells at his best is still no Shakespeare when it comes to style or developing characters, but he can be really good at plotting and hitting the reader with ideas that, at least in the last days of the Victorian era, they might not have ever considered before. Wells wrote with the primary purpose of opening people’s minds to a whole new realm of possibilities, which he believed in as both an SF writer and a socialist. That the politics of genre SF (we’re talking about the views of authors and editors) during its early years, from the 1920s to about 1950, would be a lot more reactionary than Wells, is beside the point. You could argue A Story of the Days to Come is SF in its purest form, that being it’s devoted to speculating on the future, and cannot be confused for any other genre. For better or worse.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “To Fit the Crime” by Joe Haldeman

February 18th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, April 1971.)

Who Goes There?

For the past fifty-odd years, but especially from the ’70s to about the turn of the millennium, Joe Haldeman has been one of the most acclaimed “war” writers in SF, although war is far from the only topic he’s written about (see today’s story). He was one of those authors who, before he could even start his career as a writer, got drafted and thrown into the Vietnam War, where he saw action as a combat engineer. He got injured, damn near killed apparently, and sent home, and it was as he recovered from his wounds that he took up the pen (or probably typewriter) in earnest. His first story was published in 1969, but it wasn’t until the following year that multiple Haldeman stories saw print, and within a handful of years he made his way to the top of the totem pole. I need not tell you about his Hugo- and Nebula-winning 1974 novel The Forever War, which to this day remains one of the most beloved and widely read SF novels of its type—it might even be the most universally beloved military SF novel of all time. Haldeman would write a lot more novels and short fiction, including the fix-up “novel” All My Sins Remembered, which contains “To Fit the Crime.” This is an SF-detective hybrid with a rather strong trace of noir.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1971 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It has only been reprinted as part of All My Sins Remembered.

Enhancing Image

The stories that comprise All My Sins Remembered (it’s classified as either a novel or a collection, depending on the source) star Otto McGavin, an agent working for the TBII whose gimmick is that he goes under a variety of disguises, which require him to not only get covered in “plasti-flesh” but also adopt someone else’s personality via “hypnotraining.” We can now infer, with the gift of hindsight, that Otto will come out of the case of the week in one piece, although in fairness, readers would not have known this at the time. The case in question has to do with some mysterious deaths out of the indigenous population on Bruuch, a prospecting planet that’s basically run by a single company, and on which the natives are put to work either in the fields or mining in the planet’s depths. Otto is an operator, which is to say he’s a very special agent at the TBII, and two operators have already gone missing (presumed dead) on Bruuch, investigating the same case. No answers as to what’s going on as of yet. The idea, then, is to have Otto go undercover as Dr. Isaac Crowell, a renowned scientist who’s studied the Bruuchians enough to speak their language, to an extent. Crowell has not actually been on Bruuch in many years, though. Otto is 27 years old but playing a man in his sixties, with the biggest strain being the pounds of plasti-flesh and what have you, as well as the difference in gravity on Bruuch. He’s wearing a highly advanced fat suit, is what I’m saying.

There are really three mysteries in “To Fit the Crime,” which have to do with why the Bruuchian miners have been dying more often as of late, what happened to the other two operators, and less urgently but just as importantly, what “stillness” means for the Bruuchians. Mind you that Haldeman doesn’t describe the Bruuchians much, but they’re supposed to be at least humanoid enough, and that culturally they seem to have something in common with ancient Egypt and certain Native American peoples. In terms of alienness they barely count as such, clearly being stand-ins for real-world people of color who’ve had to live under European or American colonialism. Bruuch is a prospector planet, as I said, in that it’s like one of those company towns that’s run arguably more by a monopoly than the local government, or rather government and capital are most intimately in cahoots with each other. Again, because we now can figure that Otto survives and presumably solves the case of the week, spoiling this story borders on impossible. It doesn’t help that even without the foreknowledge of this being the first entry in a series it’s not exactly unpredictable. This is a problem the detective genre tends to run into anyway, but it’s compounded when combined with SF because SF gives you a nigh-infinite number of tools you could use to solve a crime that one can’t have in real life. You have the issue of the reader being able to foresee the solution well before the detective does, but you also have the issue of said detective being able to solve the case and get out of trouble any which way the author chooses. The only reason Otto even gets as far as he does is because he has technology available to him that we (both in the 1970s and now) don’t. Also, aside from Otto the only character who appears in maybe two scenes is Dr. Waldo Norman, who becomes his closest ally while on Bruuch. Conversely the villains (there’s more than one) only appear long enough so that the reader gets a good idea, right away, that these men have been doing something with the miners.

Not that “To Fit the Crime” is bad by any means; it’s a perfect decent detective story. It helps that it’s a rather short novella, maybe 19,000 words, and for that sort of story it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The third mystery I had mentioned is also the most intriguing, for its ambiguity and also it being the most SFnal element. See, as I was reading “To Fit the Crime” I was wondering if I had somehow pissed a passage as to what “stillness” means, because it’s a ritual the Bruuchians perform on their dying and it’s something Dr. Crowell (the real guy, not Otto) had studied before; yet Haldeman doesn’t give us an explanation until very late in the story. This is also an early example of a certain type of detective story, at least in SF, although it does have roots in earlier detective novels and film noirs. I’m thinking of the story wherein a white male detective investigates the murder or disappearance of a person of color. You may be thinking of The Last Wave, or Bad Day at Black Rock, or more recently Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a progressive-minded narrative that has a hint of the white savior about it, and in the case of “To Fit the Crime” this is not helped by the Bruuchians being more human than alien. But fret not, because while the villains are exactly who you think they are (who can honestly be surprised that the evil money-grubbing white man turns out to be a murderer on top of being greedy), Otto is one of the good white people. It does its job, given the time period (I suspect also there may be subtext with how overt racism played into the then-ongoing Vietnam War, even towards the South Vietnamese, our “allies”), but there’s also a reason Martin Scorsese deconstructed this sort of narrative in Killers of the Flower Moon. Maybe it’s wishful thinking that one good man can save a whole village and punish the guilty in the process.

There Be Spoilers Here

There really isn’t much to give away here, except for what stillness actually is. So, one would think this is something biologically unique to Buuchians, but they can also perform it on humans, including the bad guys. It’s basically a state of half-life in which the person’s body freezes up and they enter a kind of cold sleep, except without the actual freezing. They may as well be dead, but they don’t technically die and they certainly don’t decay. It’s like a perfect embalming. It’s supposed to be a death ritual the Bruuchians typically reserve for members of their own community, although how they’re able to do it and what the evolutionary benefit of such an ability could be are not clearly stated. It’s fine, we don’t need to know.

A Step Farther Out

Mind you that this is very early Haldeman, so it’s fair to say he was still finding his legs as a writer. Still, not bad, if rather standard. I would be curious to see the other Otto McGavin stories in All My Sins Remembered, since that seems to be the only damn way you can read all of them. I also liked Haldeman enough already that no doubt I’ll be covering something much later of his… eventually.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Sunfire by Francis Stevens (Part 2/2)

February 15th, 2025

(Cover by R. M. Mally. Weird Tales, September 1923.)

The Story So Far

A group of five ~~stupid white men~~ explorers have ventured deep into the Brazilian jungle, along the Rio Silencioso, in search of a piece of ancient South American architecture which may hold immense riches. They do find what they’re looking for—and also a good deal more on top of that. The pyramid is “hollow,” and also seemingly abandoned. The only sign from the outside that there might be people here is a seaplane in the river, in working order but also abandoned. The explorers consider this now at least in part a rescue mission, starting with the one living person they find: a pretty young white girl, who does not give her name and who will not or cannot talk with the explorers. The extremely racist and apparently hormone-addled men practically trip over their own dicks in order to please the girl, or to understand her at all, but she makes it clear she’s not to be understood on their terms. The girl uses “Pan’s pipes” to charm the obligatory monster of the story, a giant snake-centipede creature, whose biological origin remains unexplained, although between that and the giant diamond at the center of the pyramid, the “Sunfire” of the title, this is a story that rings as nominally SF rather than fantasy. It could also be considered an early example of horror-comedy, albeit not an effective one. The explorers seem to have gotten this far on sheer idiot luck, since they repeatedly exhibit a lack of professionalism and competency. The question then is, how will they get out of this? Who is the girl, really, and what does she want? Who gives a shit? Certainly not me.

Enhancing Image

I started reading King Solomon’s Mines yesterday and am already about a third into it; it’s a rather short novel, but it’s also addicting. While H. Rider Haggard’s novel is certainly “problematic,” and has gained sort of a reputation for being such, it’s still nowhere near as racist as Sunfire, or indeed many of the “lost race” pulp adventures that Haggard partly inspired. Sunfire really is not unique in any way, compared to other pulp writing of the 1910s and ’20s, except maybe that it infuses more humor than the norm, and also the fact that Stevens was a woman. In fairness, there is a hint of proto-feminism here, although Stevens does little to advance it. While not technically the protagonist, the girl (we find out her name is Enid Widdiup) is the sun around which the rest of the story revolves, and ultimately, once she’s been broken out of her trance, she ends up being more competent and well-spoken than the explorers. Enid in fact turns out to be an aviator, which would make her one of the very first female aviators in history; she’s also an explorer herself, and she had actually come here on the seaplane the men had seen earlier. This is all rather curious, and it would be much more than just a curiosity if Stevens hadn’t waited until damn near the end of the story to tell us. If Sunfire has an major issue, aside from the dump truck’s worth of racism, it’s that it feels generally undercooked, being a novella with a cast of characters that’s mostly unmemorable and interchangeable. I neglect to mention the explorers’ names because they really don’t matter much. Because of the somewhat comedic tone, the stakes get deflated before Stevens can lay on some really juicy weird horror.

There’s also the villain, or rather villainess, named Sifa, who barely figures into things—another example of Stevens presenting us with something that would be curious, but only just that, as it stands. She only appears in the back end of Sunfire and ends up not being much of a threat. I was reading Bobby D.’s review of Sunfire, to see if he might’ve noticed something I did not, although given that his work tends to be focused around H. P. Lovecraft it was not as much about the story itself as I would’ve hoped; but still he said that Stevens’s story borders on being a parody of what was then a dominant form of pulp writing, although unfortunately it doesn’t go far enough. She has some fun with her incompetent “heroes,” but their rampant bigotry is more played for laughs than something that Stevens actually criticizes. Even for someone who was probably on the liberal side circa 1920, white supremacy was less of a threat to the wellbeing of mankind and more of perhaps a nuisance. The explorers are basically the white trio (so minus the fascinating and surprisingly progressively portrayed Umbopa) of King Solomon’s Mines, but without most of those men’s virtues and with their more unsavory characteristics turned up a notch or two. This may have been intentional on Stevens’s part, but then probably not; from the little pulp fiction of the era that I’ve read it’s not unusual for the protagonists to come off as, let’s say flawed to the point of obnoxiousness. Indeed despite being the literary generation to come after the likes of Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson (who, make no mistake, wrote “popular fiction” and not what was then considered of the “literary” sort), the field that Stevens wrote seemed more stilted and narrow-minded. Even the most acclaimed of the early 20th century pulp writers, namely Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt, now strike us as semi-literate and offensive. Reading such fiction feels like seeing an ancient fly trapped in amber.

On a positive note, I do like the “author’s note” at the end, in which Stevens treats the characters as if they’re real people, and gives a kind of “where are they now” epilogue that one often sees at the end of the movies that are “based on a true story.” It’s cute.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve read from more than one person that Sunfire is really not where one ought to start with Stevens, which is a shame since it’s the only story of hers that’s eligible for review on this here website. Stevens wrote for the general pulps in the 1910s, before the likes of Weird Tales and other “modern” genre magazines came along, and one does get the sense that she wrote for that earlier market rather than what was then the new generation of pulp fiction. In that sense I feel bad, since I know I’ve been treating her a bit harshly by way of tackling something which she herself seemed to have thought so little of that she let it sit on her desk, or on some shelf, collecting dust for a few years before it was finally published.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “When the Bough Breaks” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

February 11th, 2025

(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, November 1944.)

Who Goes There?

I know Valentine’s Day is still a few days off, but now is as good a time as any to return to two of my favorite old-timey SFF writers: Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Kuttner and Moore both made their debuts in Weird Tales in the ’30s, with Moore being a few years older than her future husband and also having entered the field a few years earlier. Moore quickly became one of the most beloved writers on the market, such that Kuttner, himself very young and new to writing, sending her fan letters. The two found that they were both California denizens, and the mutual admiration between the writers soon budded into romance. They married in 1940, and stayed so until Kuttner’s untimely death in 1958, just short of his 43rd birthday. Apart they were very fine writers, each in his or her own way, but together they synthesized such that there’s continued speculation to this day as to who wrote what (or how much) of most of their collaborative fiction. Nearly all of the fiction they wrote together was published either under a few pseudonyms or Kuttner’s name alone. (I have to assume using Kuttner’s name was partly institutional misogyny and also the result of unfortunate timing, since while Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales loved Moore’s work, he also retired from the magazine before dying shortly thereafter in 1940. Other editors of the period were not so egalitarian.) Today’s story, “When the Bough Breaks,” was first published under “Lewis Padgett.”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, with its iconic Timmins cover and featuring one of Theodore Sturgeon’s most famous stories. “When the Bough Breaks” has been reprinted quite a few times, in Beyond Time and Space (ed. August Derleth), The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (ed. John W. Campbell), Tomorrow’s Children (ed. Isaac Asimov), Some Things Dark and Dangerous (ed. Joan Kahn), The Great SF Stories Volume 6 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and the Kuttner-Moore collection Two-Handed Engine.

Enhancing Image

Joe Calderon and his wife Myra are normal white middle-class parents, raising their 18-month-old son Alexander—the difference being that Alexander not only has unusual body proportions (namely a bigger head than normal), but also that he’s been exhibiting higher intelligence than the average baby. Things get suddenly much weirder when Joe and Myra are visited by a group of rather short men in weird costumes, who all have similar proportions to Alexander but as adults. The men, who claim to have come from the future, explain that they’ve come here actually on Alexander’s orders—the adult Alexander of the future, that is. The idea is that Alexander is a superman, an “X Free super,” with enormous mental powers, including (of course) ESP. Indeed Alexander is supposedly the first of this forthcoming generation of “homo superior,” which is destined to overtake “homo sap.” But that’s in the distant future. The time-traveling men have come back to give the still-infant Alexander an education, since Alexander of the future apparently laments that he had not been able to tap into his powers when he was very young; so rather than wait, he opted to have his baby self taught ahead of schedule, as it were. Joe and Myra will serve as babysitters for the, well, baby, less teaching him and more making sure he doesn’t accidentally stick a fork in an electrical socket. The time travelers understand that changing the past like this will have a kind of rubber band effect on the future—or so they claim. What actually happens is a lot more unexpected—to the characters, if not the reader.

You can sort of see where this is going, not least because we’re so accustomed to time-travel stories that try every which way to put a twist on the basic premise that we’re conditioned to expect some kind of paradox, and as such this is a difficult story to discuss without talking about the ending, which despite being predictable is pretty memorable. Then again, “When the Bough Breaks” feels more like a Kuttner story than a Moore story, and one of the things Kuttner is very good at is showing characters get their comeuppance, or rather he’s fond of indulging in sadistic cases of cause-and-effect. If you’re even a little shitty as a person you’ll probably not come out unscathed in a Kuttner story, especially if you’re the hero (or rather anti-hero). Luckily for Joe and Myra they are not on the receiving end of Kuttner-Moore’s wrath ultimately, but still unfortunately for them they have to take a beating first. I’ll get to the question lingering in the back of all our minds later, but for now let’s talk about the immediate problem of raising a superbaby: the fact that said superbaby has superhuman powers, but has not yet developed the capacity for morality or empathy. The time travelers teach Alexander how to make use of his powers, but they see no point in teaching him some basic things, such as how to get along with other people or understand them at all, for they see something like that as beneath “homo superior.” If the time travelers and Alexander tell us anything it’s that this future breed of humanity may be objectively more powerful than normal human beings, but they seem to have the emotional maturity of children. What if you gave some tech billionaire who never engaged with the humanities when they were in college ESP? You can probably guess.

“When the Bough Breaks” could be considered a slightly less serious companion to Kuttner and Moore’s more famous story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” which similarly is about children unexpectedly coming into contact with something from the distant future; but whereas the inciting incident in “Mimsy” was a freak accident, in “When the Bough Breaks” it’s quite deliberate. I think it’s also worth mentioning that Kuttner and Moore, especially when writing together, wrote a fair deal about something that rarely went shown or even implied in Campbellian SF: the relationships between parents and their children. There are quite a few Kuttner-Moore stories about raising children, which is a bit ironic given that they were childless (not for lack of trying). But then Yasujirō Ozu, who was also childless and a lifelong bachelor on top of that, was perhaps the greatest of all filmmakers when it came to depicting parent-child relations. (As an aside, one of my pet peeves is parents who act as if raising children blessed them with some innate wisdom or maturity, considering how many fascists [especially Christofascists] I’ve met who call themselves “proud parents.”) “Mimsy” and “When the Bough Breaks” are both somewhat satirical but also somewhat foreboding stories, about normal people in then-contemporary times (the 1940s), who find themselves faced with science that almost comes across as magic. Indeed “When the Bough Breaks” is vaguely fantastic, despite officially being SF, as well as Biblical, what with Joe and Myra sounding a lot like Joseph and Mary—a connection I’m sure Kuttner and Moore had intended. But if Alexander is a Christ figure, which really is how the men from the future treat him, then he’s a Christ without even a hint of ur-socialism, which is to say he has no concern for other people’s wellbeing. As you can guess, this can only end well.

There Be Spoilers Here

Alexander, having become more attuned to his ESP but also more of a monster around the house, has been fiddling with some kind of egg-shaped gadget. Since the third-person narration is thoroughly grounded in Joe and Myra’s perspectives, we know about as much about the gadget as they do, which is to say nothing. The gadget, however, does turn out to do something—although not what Alexander or the time travelers would’ve hoped. There’s a blinding white light and then where Alexander once was he is no more; and while at first the parents think maybe he teleported like before (because he can do that), it seems he just… vanished. Or that he never existed. Kuttner and Moore were both pessimists, which you can figure out once you’ve read even a bit of either of their work. I myself am also a pessimist, so I relate to their dim view of the human condition. One of the basic tenets of philosophical pessimism is that it is perhaps better to not have been born than to live, which should be construed with the notion that it’s better to commit suicide than to live; although of course some pessimists (I’m immediately thinking of Philipp Mainländer) do end up committing suicide. My point is that the “solution,” or at least the resolution, of the story is the time paradox that probably popped into your head much earlier, which is that if Alexander messed with the past via teaching his past self at a point in time earlier than what would’ve compelled Alexander to do this in the first place, then if the past Alexander “succeeds” the Alexander of the future no longer exists. Since the future Alexander no longer exist, neither does the Alexander of the past. Time “corrects” itself: Alexander was never born. From Kuttner-Moore’s viewpoint this is probably for the best. On the one hand, Joe and Myra’s troubles are over, but unfortunately for them they still have memories of their son who once existed but now never did.

A Step Farther Out

I have to admit my enjoyment of this one was marred slightly by the mediocre proofreading for Two-Handed Engine, which seems to be even more so with this story than some others in that collection. Thinking on it, however, it’s hard to deny its effectiveness and memorability as old-timey SF writing. While you can anticipate the ending, it’s still a really bittersweet conclusion that feels perfectly logical, given what Kuttner and Moore had set up for it. Granted, if you’re already a Kuttner-Moore fan then there’s a good chance you’ve already read this one, in which case I need not try to convince you. I am glad that I finally got around to it, though.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Sunfire by Francis Stevens (Part 1/2)

February 8th, 2025

(Cover by R. M. Mally. Weird Tales, July-August 1923.)

Who Goes There

Francis Stevens is the androgynous-sounding pseudonym of one Gertrude Bennett, who, for just a handful of years, wrote prolifically for pulp magazines such as Argosy and Adventure, that generation of cheap fiction magazines which preceded the first proper “genre” magazines (in the US, anyway) such as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Stevens wrote fiction at a mile a minute for the same reason a lot of authors did in those days: it helped pay the bills. She apparently wrote to help with her ailing mother, although once her mother finally passed on she stopped writing fiction full stop. She was one of the first female pulp/genre writers in American literature, making her one of the true pioneers; but she was (and still is) such an obscure figure that it took many years to verify when she actually died, not helped by the fact that she seemed to vanish off the face of the earth for the last quarter-century of her life. Unfortunately, Stevens’s story is not unusual among pre-New Wave female writers in this field. Sunfire was the last Stevens story published, by a few years, although it wasn’t necessarily the last one she wrote. Somebody, maybe Stevens herself, took it off the shelf, dusted it off, and submitted it to the newfangled Weird Tales, for one last paycheck. The result is a story (it’s really a novella) that feels more in line with pulpy adventure fiction that would’ve been popular in the 1910s than the occult horror and dark fantasy of Weird Tales.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in the July-August and September issues of Weird Tales. It would not be reprinted in any form until it got a chapbook from Apex International in 1996—73 years after its original pubilication. It would get a more adequate reprint in the Stevens collection The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy. Despite what that title might make you think, I would consider Sunfire to be nominally SF.

Enhancing Image

Five stupid white men have ventured deep into the Brazilian rainforest, along the Rio Silencioso (“the River of Silence”), in search of a mythical island amidst the jungle depths, known as Tata Quarahy, “Fire of the Sun.” The trip had started out with the help of a local guide, named Petro, plus four other locals who go unnamed and who assisted with the boating, as the waters and their environs are indeed treacherous. Prior to the story’s beginning, Petro and the other locals had all died from what amounted to food poisoning, with the adventurers being spared on account of having taken their own separate meals, which is a funny way of saying the white men have only gotten this far because of some ridiculously good luck. The fact that five people have already died from this adventure doesn’t seem to bother the survivors much, probably because the ones who’ve died were non-white. Incidentally, at least in this installment, we don’t encounter a single non-white person within the “screen” of the action, with Petro only occasionally being quoted from beyond the grave. The irony of this story’s flippant treatment of its indigenous characters (or rather, how it keeps said characters totally offscreen via the grim reaper) is that the white men are for the most part interchangeable in character. These fuckers more or less act and talk the same as each other. As a compromise I’ll only be mentioning individual names when it’s needed to make sense of the plot, which paradoxically both is and is not hard to follow.

The adventurers have miraculously come upon the island, which is quite small but which hosts a pyramid, implying the existence of a tribe here. However, since this is a pulp adventure story written in 1920 at the latest, the presence of a pyramid must mean that something malicious is brewing. Indeed, Our Heroes™ find a seaplane on the water, close to the island and still seemingly in working condition, but abandoned. Somebody from the “civilized” world had been here recently, although whether they’re still alive is another question. They suspect, correctly, that if they’re to find answers that they would be inside the pyramid, which, much like with some real-life pyramids (and also Super Mario 64), is a lot bigger on the inside than the outside. A few complications arise, though. The first is that through all their searching outside the pyramid, the only other person they can find is a young white girl, probably in her teens, who either will not or cannot talk to the white men, despite obviously not being native to this dark little corner of the world. The other is a giant monster, somewhere between a snake and a centipede, large enough to kill a man, but which the woman, with the power of Pan’s pipes, is able to hyponotize.

The thing had the general shape of a mighty serpent. But instead of a barrellike body and scaly skin, it was made up of short, fiat segments, sandy yellow in color, every segment graced—or damned—with a pair of frightful talons, daggerpointed, curved, murderous. At times the monstrous, bleached-yellow length seemed to cover half the floor in a veritable pattern of fleeing segments.

This is all haphazardly written, of course, in a way that would have been the norm for pulp fiction of the time but not “literary” fiction. Stevens, like most if not all of her peers, wrote for money, and writing with a paycheck as the first (probably only) incentive does not encourage fine-tuning one’s prose. Oh, it’s quite bad, but that part of the deal is unsurprising. Even the king of the pulpsters, Edgar Rice Burroughs, whom genre writers in the following generation or two treated as a demigod, was by no means a good writer by the metrics of what we now call good writing. If Stevens can be commended for anything it’s what she decides to not write, as opposed to what’s on the page, namely with how she treats the mysterious girl. Whereas we’re stuck with five nigh=interchangeable buffoons for the whole ordeal, the girl Our Heroes™ are determined to rescue (because they find her attractive, and also [they mention this several times explicitly] because she’s white) comes off as an enigma. She saves the adventurers from the giant monster but then basically traps them inside the pyramid. The reader is thus presented with two conflicts: how the adventurers are to get out of this mess, and also what they ought to do with the girl, who seems prone to either helping them or endangering them depending on her mood. There is also the larger mystery of the pyramid, but that’s really secondary.

Readers who are unfamiliar with the low standards of early 20th century pulp prose may survive said prose in a vacuum, but will have a much harder time coping with Sunfire‘s almost cartoonish levels of racism. The racism is almost, for better or worse, very much a staple of that generation of pulp writing, in the days before “science fiction” even came about as a term. I’m still a layman, so I’m not sure why, even by the standards of the time, pulp fiction comes off as especially bigoted, since the literary fiction of the time, while certainly guilty of racism and perhaps most notably antisemitism (ask F. Scott Fitzgerald why he wrote a Jewish caricature in The Great Gatsby), tended to not be nearly this outward with its WASP-y insecurities. The closest I can think of as an explanation is that pulp fiction of the time, having been written to serve the short-term intrigue of people who may not have the time or education to invest in “the good stuff,” emphasizes the exotic, which means Orientalism. Anything outside the Anglosphere is different, which usually means it’s fascinating but in some way defective, if not downright evil. One of the adventurers, when recalling a piece of advice the late Petro had given them, notes that Portuguese, at least in context of Brazilian speakers, is a “simple” language. There’s a “comedic” scene in which, inside the pyramid, two of the adventurers, Sigsbee and Tellifer (the latter nicknamed “TNT”), fall into a dark pit and get covered head to toe in black soot. Sigsbee, with a giggle, says the two of them resemble black people like this, although he doesn’t say “black people.”

This is the kind of material I’m working with.

There Be Spoilers Here

Not only are the adventurers trapped here, and TNT having nearly fallen to his death in a black pit, but the soot on their bodies takes on a much more sinister (and I do have to say genuinely creepy) turn when it’s revealed that that the big prize of the pyramid, what seems to be a huge diamond, is used as a lens, or rather like a big magnifying glass when the sun strikes through the top of the pyramid at a certain angle. Whatever is caught in the black pit when this happens will be burned to a crisp, with only soot left behind as the remains are dumped or perhaps fed to the giant monster. The diamond, the “Sunfire” of the story’s title, is what the adventurers must seek after aside from the girl, but also the thing most liable to kill them. How will they get out of this sticky situation? What is the deal with the girl? Why do I torture myself by reading something so bad?

A Step Farther Out

Well, sometimes you have to read trash in order to better appreciate the gold; or in this case, read a laughably racist and single-minded adventure yarn that the author neglected to publish for a few years.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “The Glowing Cloud” by Steven Utley

February 4th, 2025

(Cover by Bob Eggleton. Asimov’s, January 1992.)

Who Goes There?

Steven Utley would probably be more known today had he taken to writing novels, but he was one of those exceedingly rare writers who never got into novels, preferring to stick purely to short fiction and poetry. Utley was born in Kentucky, at Fort Knox (he was a military brat), and understandably his family moved around when he was young before he settled in Texas (Austin) as an adult, then later Tennessee. He’s partly responsible for the discovery of fellow Austin weirdo Bruce Sterling. He was one of those authors who came about during the post-New Wave period, in the early ’70s, and he wrote prolifically during that decade before falling pretty much silent during the ’80s; then, for reasons I’ve not been able to look into, he came back to writing SF in the early ’90s and basically didn’t stop until his death in 2013. I must have read a few Utley stories before, just because he was a frequent presence in Asimov’s in the ’90s, but I’m struggling to think of their titles off the top of my head. I shouldn’t have such an issue with “The Glowing Cloud,” which, while a little bloated, is a harrowing time-travel story about one of the most horrifying natural disasters of the 20th century: the eruption of Mount Pelée and the destruction of St. Pierre.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1992 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, almost on the 90th anniversary of the disaster. It’s only been reprinted twice, in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois) and the Utley collection Where or When.

Enhancing Image

Everyone knows about Pompeii; to this day it remains the most famous case of a whole town getting buried by volcanic eruption. In 79 CE Mount Vesuvius erupted and killed everyone who was in Pompeii on that day, and the city remained undisturbed and seemingly unnoticed for some 1,500 years until archeologists rediscovered it. Up to 20,000 people died from Mount Vesuvius eruption, but the case of the Mount Pelée eruption of 1902 is in some ways even more remarkable, for it being a relatively modern and well-documented tragedy, for having an even higher body count (nearly 30,000 people), and for the fact that such a disaster could have been easily minimized, yet it was not. St. Pierre (or Saint-Pierre as it’s also called) was a French settlement on the island of Martinique, densely populated and apparently brimming with night life, nicknamed the “Little Paris” of the West Indies. However, a minor character, one Father Hayot, in Utley’s story also calls it “Little Sodom,” which both indicates what the priest sees as a moral vacuum in the city, but also alludes to its imminent destruction—at the hands of Nature, if not a vengeful God. In his introductory blurb, Gardner Dozois says this story “was directly inspired by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witt’s book The Day the World Ended,” and one does get the impression Utley did a good bit of research on the topic before he really began work on “The Glowing Cloud.” This is a story that’s effective at a couple things, not least sparking interest in its subject.

The actual plot is more of a standard cat-and-mouse time-travel thriller, although this is not necessarily a bad thing. Medlin is a time-traveling agent who’s been sent back to St. Pierre, not quite on the eve of its destruction but a little too close for comfort, in search of Garrick, a fellow agent who has gone rogue and apparently has been hiding out in St. Pierre. Another agent, Ranke, was supposed to accompany Medlin to this point, but so far is nowhere to be seen; not that this troubles Medlin too much, given that he has a rather strong dislike for Ranke and indeed it’s the latter’s arrival that the reader is supposed to dread. This manhunt has a couple complications, one being that Garrick is an older woman, a veteran of the profession, and also that she’s the one who had mentored Medlin in the first place. Medlin knows he’ll have to capture or kill Garrick, neither of which he really wants to do. So, there’s the internal conflict, but there’s also an invisible timer to make things more tense, because Medlin has about a week to bring back Garrick (dead or alive) before Mount Pelée engulfs the city, that final explosion and the “glowing cloud” of the story’s title. At this point the volcano has been belching and its environs have already gotten a taste of volcanic ash. The sky has mostly been blotted out. The townspeople are aware that the volcano will erupt, but also that St. Pierre is at a safe distance from what would be lava flow; unfortunately, what Medlin knows about the the townspeople don’t is pyroclastic flow. In case you forgot, pyroclastic flow is the worst that can happen in the event of a volcanic eruption, in which volcanic matter can hurtle downhill at hundreds of miles an hour. It would be impossible to escape on short notice.

Medlin already knows that everyone in town (there are only three people on record who had witnessed Mount Pelée’s eruption and lived to tell the tale) will die soon, which doesn’t help matters any. Conditions have become semi-apocalyptic, even as the government and businesses try to act like everything will turn out fine. Consider this:

It quickly became obvious to [Medlin] that the situation was not only as bad as Father Hayot had said, but becoming steadily worse. Groups of people stood about who seemed to have no place to go, no idea of what to do. These, too, had that unmistakable look of refugees; the authorities must have stopped confining them, but had not decided as yet what else to do with them. Livestock wandered loose. They seemed to be dropping dead faster than the soldiers could haul away the carcasses. Asphyxiated birds lay everywhere. The fountains were fouled with black mud.

“The Glowing Cloud” is indeed about a mini-apocalypse, which at least on a metaphorical level feels… timely. This is made more so because both Utley and Dozois make it clear that the disaster was itself inevitable, thousands of lives could have been spared had the local government evacuated the city—only they decided not to. Local news outlets (which in those days basically meant only print media), being in cahoots with the government, have been indulging in misinformation so as to disincentivize people from leaving St. Pierre. There’s an election going on, and also there seem to be genuine misunderstandings about the severity of the volcanic activity. The most infuriating instance, for both Medlin and the reader, happens much later in the story, when the mayor of St. Pierre has a speech plastered on public bulletin boards. Consider the following:

The occurrence of the eruption of Mount Pelée has thrown the whole island into consternation. But aided by the exalted intervention of the Governor and of superior authority, the Municipal Administration has provided, in so far as it has been able, for distribution of essential foods and supplies. The calmness and wisdom of which you have proved yourselves capable in these recent anguished days allows us to hope that you will not remain deaf to our appeals. In accordance with the Governor, whose devotion is ever in command of circumstances, we believe ourselves able to assure you that, in view of the immense valleys which separate us from the crater, we have no immediate danger to fear. The lava will not reach as far as the town. Any further manifestion [sic] will be restricted to those places already affected. Do not, therefore, allow yourselves to fall victims to groundless panic. Please allow us to advise you to return to your normal occupation, setting the necessary example of courage and strength during this time of public calamity.

Does this remind you of anything?

St. Pierre itself is an interesting locale, even if we get to know only a few of the locals. It’s a French settlement, founded way back in 1635, during the first age of European colonialism, and given its placement in the Caribbean Medlin notes that many if not most of the population is actually non-white, being black or biracial. There’s Madame Boislaville and her young daughter Elizabeth, who give Medlin shelter during the days spends searching for Garrick. (I assume Madame and her daughter are characters of Utley’s invention.) That’s about it, at least without getting into spoilers. Given that it’s a decently sized novella, the plot of “The Glowing Cloud” is rather straightforward and its cast rather small. Its length comes in no small part from it being such a chatty novella, with a few choice characters waxing philosophical about the nature of time travel and whether it’s ethical to try saving the lives of thousands, or even a few individuals, when history dictates these people are supposed to die. History will of course not be defied here, at least in broad strokes. Garrick herself is not trying to alter history, but rather went AWOL by stealing a special drug that would make time-traveling easier and less painful for the traveler, the result being that she can really leave whenever she feels like it. This is a bit of an anticlimax for such a long story, and unlike the other anticlimax it doesn’t feel deliberate on Utley’s part. It could be that while he at some point imagined Garrick as the villain, he simply could not fit her in that role, even thought she does come off as callous. I like Garrick less as a character and more how she compares with Medlin and Ranke, with Medlin being at a crossroads between agents who are more sociopathic than him, to varying degrees. This is ultimately a story about the capacity for human empathy.

There Be Spoilers Here

By the time Ranke shows up, it’s the day before St. Pierre’s appointment with annihilation, so he’s a bit late to the party. Right away he’s shown to be a bit of a hothead, never mind a threat to both of his fellow agents. Utley has been building up Ranke’s arrival for most of the story, so when he finally gets here, appearing as the closest “The Glowing Cloud” has to a human villain, he doesn’t disappoint—for all of the five or six pages he’s here. The most violent and surprising scene in the whole novella is when Ranke, apparently having bitten off more than he could chew with the locals, gets quite literally cut down by an angry mob “as if he were merely some obstinate jungle growth,” mere hours after landing in St. Pierre. By far the most “macho” character of the lot gets his just desserts rather promptly, and even Garrick points out that Ranke’s tough-guy act wouldn’t work.

So there’s that.

Just as curiously is that when it seems everything’s going to hell, Medlin gets rescued at the last minute by a group of fellow time-travelers, although evidently they’re not from the same organization; rather they’re a team of volcanologists from the future (even ahead of Medlin and Garrick’s future), here to observe the eruption of Mount Pelée from a safe distance. This is certainly what we call a happy coincidence, although it also makes sense for time travelers to go back and study a natural disaster like this first-hand, in a time when volcanology wasn’t a discipline yet. Medlin convinces Garrick to take Madame and Elizabeth, so that he might rescue just a couple people from the impending disaster, although the very end of the story is ambiguous if Our Heroes™ actually succeed in evading the glowing cloud. Utley opts (I suppose wisely) for a cautiously optimistic final note, which still feels like a happy ending given how grim this story is.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve seen people react to the current situation in the US like things can’t get much worse. Oh, they can get worse, it’s just a question of how much. Was totally not thinking about that while reading “The Glowing Cloud.” I wonder how many anthologies there are about SF involving natural disasters? I’m a bit surprised this story hasn’t been included in any.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: February 2025

February 1st, 2025
(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, April 1971.)

We seem to be living in a world of shit, or at least it’s easy to think that way. The irony is that the people who think this the most are also probably (being queer and disabled I’m actually not sure how I’m gonna turn out) the ones most likely to come out of all this bullshit unharmed—in body, if not in soul or mind. But, the show continues. I thought I had more to say for this month’s forecast, and at this point I think it’s fair to say my Things Beyond posts have become like actual weather forecasts (I predict, but that doesn’t mean the thing will 100% happen); but still, aside from a couple things I’m sure we all know about already, the past month has been uneventful. I got my purchases for Worldcon at basically the last minute, so I’ll be seeing what I can see of the con virtually if not in person, and with any luck I’ll even be on a couple panels, as one of those inside-a-computer people. I’ve been slowly but surely moving “up” in the world of fandom.

Anyway, for decades we’ve got two stories from the 1920s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1970s, one from the 1990s, and one from the 1890s. As for the stories themselves, we have…

For the serial:
1. Sunfire by Francis Stevens. Serialized in Weird Tales, July-August to September 1923. Francis Stevens is the androgynous-sounding pseudonym of one Gertrude Bennett, who for just a few years wrote prolifically for the pulp magazines, apparently to help pay the bills. Once her sickly mother died, she stopped writing fiction, with Sunfire being the last story of hers published. It would take more than seventy years for this story to appear in book form.
2. A Story of the Days to Come by H. G. Wells. Serialized in Amazing Stories, April to May 1928. First published in 1899. Wells is perhaps the most crucial pioneer of science fiction; aside from maybe Edgar Allan Poe he stands as arguably the genre’s nucleus. This is made more remarkable since Wells wrote his most famous work over the span of only about a decade. This story comes from said decade of greatness, but I guess due to its length it remains overlooked.
For the novellas:
1. “The Glowing Cloud” by Steven Utley. From the January 1992 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Utley was born in Kentucky, at Fort Knox (he was a military brat), before moving to Texas (Austin), and then finally Tennessee. He wrote prolifically in the ’70s, all of it short fiction, as one of the post-New Wave generation. He then fell mostly silent in the ’80s before reemerging in the early ’90s.
2. “To Fit the Crime” by Joe Haldeman. From the April 1971 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Haldeman, like Utley, came about during the post-New Wave era; he had spent the New Wave years in college, and then in Vietnam, where he got damn near killed. Once his wounds healed enough he got to work writing SF. This story here is the first in a loose series, starring Otto McGavin.
For the short stories:
1. “When the Bough Breaks” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. From the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novelette. I had missed the boat on reviewing Moore solo last month, and I can’t review Kuttner solo next month either; so together here they go. Kuttner and Moore were of course married, and they’re also two of my favorite writers.
2. “The End of the Party” by Graham Greene. From the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond. First published in 1932. Greene was famous in his day as both a serious novelist and a writer of espionage thrillers, although the two were not mutually exclusive. He also occasionally dabbled in supernatural horror, with this story being one of his own personal favorite works despite its age.
Won’t you read with me?
Serial Review: Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein (Part 4/4)

January 29th, 2025

(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, December 1957.)

The Story So Far

Thorby, once a slave a Jubbulpore, a city where slavery is alive and well, then taken in and educated by a “beggar” named Baslim, has since grown up to become a surprisingly intelligent (albeit not wise) young man. He joined the Free Traders for a time, under the foster care of Captain Krausa and the tyrannical matriarch Grandmother, only for the latter to die and Thorby to leave the Free Traders. A philosophical dialogue with Dr. Mader, the only passenger aboard the Free Trader ship Sisu (also probably my favorite scene in the whole novel, it’s at the end of Part 2), convinces Thorby he had left one kind of slavery only to enter another. After some digging on Krausa’s part a few things come to light for both parties: that Baslim was a colonel in the Terran Hegemony’s space navy, who covertly partook in anti-slavery operations, and that Thorby is not descended from the Free Traders but instead is the son of the presumably deceased former owners of Rudbek and Associates. Thorby’s birth name is Thor Bradley Rudbeck (get it? Thor Bradley? Thorby?), and since his parents are missing or dead that makes him the legal heir to the company, with all its money and influence. Small problem: John Weemsby, an in-law to the Rudbeks, has been in charge of the company for years, with his stepdaughter Leda thus being the heir prior to Thorby’s unexpected reappearance.

Enhancing Image

So, Thorby and Leda are cousins, of a sort; they’re not actually blood-related. Given that Leda is supposed to be only a bit older than Thorby, and given the strange chemistry between them, it must’ve taken Heinlein an exceeding amount of willpower to not indulge in some pseudo-incest. Of course this isn’t even the first time in Citizen of the Galaxy that pseudo-incest (I say “pseudo-” because for my money’s worth I say it’s only the real deal if they’re related enough by blood) is a bullet that Thorby dodges, although, as with Mata on the Sisu earlier in the novel, Thorby’s total lack of interest in sex “saves” him. We know that this is not how most teen (or maybe by the end of the novel he’s in his earlier twenties) boys think, but a) Thorby is not like most teen boys, and b) it’s implicitly accepted as part of the deal when reading a Heinlein juvenile. Actually, as far as the Heinlein juveniles that I’ve read so far go, Citizen of the Galaxy might be the least realistic in that it takes the most breaks from reality, but also it’s the least concerned with hard science. Part of the reason for Heinlein writing these novels in the first place was to teach young readers some facts (or what Heinlein considered facts, which is not the same thing) about space and other things. Some of these novels, despite being aimed at teenagers, border on what we now call hard SF. Citizen of the Galaxy is pretty ~~flaccid~~ loose with its science; if you went in worried about having to deal with numbers and calculations, don’t be, because there are basically none to speak of. Spaceships in this novel go however fast they fucking feel like, and time dilation seems to be a non-issue. Space as we understand it is a non-factor in the characters’ problems, which even for 1957 is pretty soft.

Instead this novel is concerned with other things, like the slave trade, and also, strangely enough, the minutia of running a business. Business majors (the few business majors who have any interest in reading real literature) will get a kick out of the last installment of this book. Citizen of the Galaxy switches gears a few times throughout, from far-future thriller to planetary advneture to, finally, a sort of legal drama. Readers in 1957 were probably not expecting this novel to end up where it does, for better or worse. Truth be told I found it to get a bit worse as it goes along, or rather I think it peaks when Thorby is with “the People” and then gets bogged down from there. Whereas the first two installments gave us some intriguing characters, from the enigmatic Baslim (even if he is clearly a stand-in for Heinlein) to the tough-minded but feeble-bodied Grandmother, the cast of the novel’s latter half is more of a mixed bag. Leda is a curiously hard-nosed young woman and one of Heinlein’s more compelling female characters, in a novel that might actually have his strongest roster of girls/women, but Weemsby is a weak villain—if you can even call him that. He’s obviously not a good person, and also is an opportunistic businessman (but then aren’t they all) who profits off the slave trade, but he never does anything particularly bad onscreen, or… on-page. The back end is chiefly concerned with what is basically a battle of wills (or rather a will, sorry for the pun) between Thorby and Weemsby, which is not as compelling (as least to me) as it sounds. Some readers will get more out of it, but a common gripe with this novel is that the ending is weak, as indeed it is, tapering off as soon as Leda hands over the business to Thorby on a silver platter. The implication is that Thorby and Leda may after all engage in some pseudo-incest, but only after the book has ended, so as to spare young readers’ virgin eyeballs.

Let’s talk about the cheery topic of slavery, and how Heinlein clearly opposes it but also tries to reconcile abolitionism with capitalism. This is heavy subject matter for a novel aimed at young readers, but then again Heinlein was not above covering dark subject matter in some of his previous juveniles. The catastrophe that happens in the back end of Farmer in the Sky might be the single bleakest stretch of writing out of Heinlein’s whole career, and again this is a novel written for high schoolers. With Citizen of the Galaxy the strange thing is more that slavery, which in this spacefaring future has made a big comeback, at least in some societies, is presented as a problem that requires a solution, as opposed to what slavery apologists tend to argue, which is either that slavery is really not that big an issue or that sure, slavery is a big issue, but it’ll inevitably get phased out on its own and we really shouldn’t do anything about it. As with most if not all right-wing beliefs, the defense of slavery, as with the defense of racism, or homophobia or transphobia, is founded on a contradiction or series of contradictions. Slavery apologists, both in Heinlein’s time and today, will very rarely argue that slavery, as it existed in the CSA, should still be around, and they may even be “happy” that it is no longer a thing; but then they’ll say that actually it should have been “left up to the states,” or that the Union (which did have a couple slave states on its side, mind you) should not have fought the CSA over slavery (although the CSA had technically fired the first shot), or even (actually this might be the most common argument) that the Civil War was not about slavery at all but about some other bullshit. So “of course” slavery is bad, but according to apologists it’s not bad enough to abolish.

Heinlein was nothing if not a man of contradictions. He started out as a progressive in the ’30s before shifting farther right, especially upon marrying Virginia, his third and last wife. One of the few things that remained consistent throughout Heinlein’s adult life was his fierce individualism, which also happened to conflict with his lifelong adoration of the military—not just the US military but the idea of the military. He served in the US Navy for five years, albeit during peacetime so it’s not like he saw combat, so he certainly had a rose-tinted view (despite the chronic illness) of such things. He also became increasingly a fierce capitalist, although truth be told he always had a quite cheritable view of capitalism, even from his earliest published stories. One of Heinlein’s more memorable characters is D. D. Harriman, the man who sold the moon, a legendary businessman who is responsible for landing the first people on the moon’s surface, despite being unqualified to go there himself. (No doubt Elon Musk sees himself as a Harriman-like figure, and he’s explicitly and repeatedly paid homage to Heinlein, although for what it’s worth I’m not sure Harriman would have been a screaming antisemite and transphobe, not to mention a cuckold.) Citizen of the Galaxy ends with Thorby, having now claimed what is “rightfully” his, vowing to do what he can to disrupt the slave trade, having already made the order to pull Rudbek and Associates out of it. This now reads as a little overly optimistic. It’s also a bit contrived that Thorby just so happens to have descended from what amounts to royalty; it’s like how Rey starts out as a peasant girl in The Force Awakens but then discovers she’s Palpatine’s granddaughter. We feel cheated somehow because we’ve been denied our working-class hero.

A Step Farther Out

Given its reputation I have to say I was a bit disappointed with Citizen of the Galaxy, as it might not even be my second favorite of the Heinlein juveniles I’ve read (I prefer Between Planets and Farmer in the Sky). I would also have to look into if Heinlein had written it with the hope of a serial run, since it does split pretty neatly into four parts; unfortunately those parts are also rather disjointed. Heinlein’s juvenile’s are beloved among older readers to this day in part because they’re some of his least problematic/uncomfortable works, and while Citizen of the Galaxy does walk a fine line with its subject matter, it does handle it better than many SF novels from the same period; indeed, it handles the issue of slavery and individual freedom better than some of Heinlein’s adult novels. As I’ve gotten older and my politics and reading tastes have shifted I’ve become more conflicted on Heinlein—but then so does everyone who isn’t a moronic sycophant.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Census Takers” by Frederik Pohl

January 25th, 2025

(Cover by Chesley Bonestell. F&SF, February 1956.)

Who Goes There?

I’m not sure if anyone can claim to have a more varied career than Frederik Pohl, who across a career of seven decades took part in the field as a writer, editor, critic, and literary agent, such that he understood basically every step of the writing and publication process. He made his debut in the late ’30s, and early on he was most active as a fan and editor, being in charge of a couple low-budget genre magazines which nevertheless acted as a training ground for some very important writers, such as Isaac Asimov and C. M. Kornbluth. Whereas some great authors specialize in one or two things, going off the rails when they deviate from their specialties, Pohl was much more of a jack of all trades. He’s one of the few people who’s won Hugos for both writing and editing. His memoir, The Way the Future Was, is a surprisingly vulnerable and self-critical account of his early days in SF fandom and making it as a professional. He was already a magazine and anthology editor of renown when he took over If and Galaxy Science Fiction in the ’60s, having already assisted H. L. Gold for some years at that point. His Hugo-winning novel Gateway is still one of the best of its kind, being a deep character study, a gripping space adventure/mystery, as well as a vicious and black-hearted critique of capitalism. Pohl died in 2013, at the age of 93, making him one of the last of the old guard to leave this realm.

Now, you may recall I was set to review a different Pohl story; actually it was a novella, called “In the Problem Pit.” Due to outside circumstances not having to do with the story itself I could barely even begin to read it, let along write a review about it. I may yet read it and write about it in the future, eventually, but that day is not today. Still, I did not want a repeat of what happened when I read C. L. Moore’s “Jirel Meets Magic” earlier this month, so I was determined to read and review a Pohl story, even if it wasn’t a novella. I dug up “The Census Takers,” which comes from a quite different period in Pohl’s career, and it was Anthony Boucher’s introductory blurb for it in F&SF that caught my attention. Boucher calls it “one of the most extraordinary jobs of effective conciseness in all of science fiction,” and I have to say I do think that praise is pretty much warranted. “The Census Takers” is brief, but it’s a dense and mean little bastard of a story, one I would consider something of a hidden gem.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; incidentally this was also Pohl’s first appearance in F&SF. It was then reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sixth Series (ed. Anthony Boucher), Nightmare Age (ed. Frederik Pohl), No Room for Man: Population and the Future Through Science Fiction (ed. Ralph S. Clem, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander), and the Pohl collections The Case Against Tomorrow and The Best of Frederik Pohl.

Enhancing Image

The narrator is Area Boss of a team of some 150 Enumerators, who over the course of six weeks are supposed to take the yearly census of a given area, called a Census Area. The story takes place somewhere in the US, although Pohl is vogue as to where (Denver gets mentioned at one point, so maybe it’s Colorado), and he’s also vague as to when this is taking place. It’s definitely the future, but there are basically no references to technology, such that the story doesn’t easily date itself. The narrator is also unnamed (sort of, we’ll get to that later), but for the short time we’re stuck with him it doesn’t take long to figure out the kind of person he is: a real no-nonsense asshole type. Manager material. The story is concerned with an incident that happened with one of the narrator’s Enumerators not too long ago, Witeck, who’s also a good friend of the narrator. “We were Enumerators together, and he was as good a man as you ever saw, absolutely nerveless when it came to processing the Overs.” Of course, one day he cracked. Supposedly. The problem is that whereas in our world a census taker’s purpose is simply to help estimate a certain area’s population, the census takers of this story have to verify if a CA is Over or Under—and if there’s even one Over in a CA then it’s a problem. A CA’s population can’t be Over or Under according to Regional Control, and if someone if Over it’s implied they get executed (an Enumerator’s “processor” is actually a gun, although this is not revealed to us right away). So two problems arise, the first being that Witeck claims to have picked up a guy without an ID or blue card who in turns claims to be some ambassador—from the interior of the planet. On the narrator’s end, he has to deal with a father and his wife and five kids, who have attempted to “Jump,” i.e., move out of the CA before the Enumerators come in.

In case you couldn’t tell, the future America of Pohl’s story is some kind of Malthusian nightmare in which the government keeps the population strictly controlled on an area-by-area basis. A CA’s population should not be Under but it especially should not be Over. Having children has apparently become seen as a necessary evil, as people on the census team are not allowed to have children and the narrator, with rather open disdain, calls parents “breeders,” regardless of whether they have one child or five. (As I was reading it I kept thinking of how some queer folks, back in the day, would call people in heterosexual relationships “breeders” as a derogatory thing, although I’m not sure if this was a thing in urban queer spaces in the ’50s, complicated further because Pohl absolutely would’ve been aware of such spaces.) Malthusianism, named after 18th century economist Thomas Malthus, is basically the belief that resources cannot keep up with population growth, i.e., there ain’t enough room in this world for all of us and at some point the bottom will fall out. In the ’50s and ’60s the belief that population growth was some big fucking problem was pretty popular among intellectuals, even left-leaning ones, resulting most famously in SF novels such as Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! and John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. Aldous Huxley, in the last decade or so of his life, became pretty vocally concerned about overpopulation and people took this seriously. I’ve read enough of Pohl’s non-fiction to get the impression he didn’t agree with such a worldview, but even if I hadn’t done the homework in advance, one gets the feeling just from reading “The Census Takers” that he had a bone to pick with Malthusianism. The census takers in-story are basically border patrol, or ICE, which is to say they’re inhuman monsters who, at best, split a family apart if something is out of order; so they’re border fascists, or rather population fascists. For such a short story, this is quite bleak…

Speaking of bleakness, in most stories the narrator would probably be the villain, but here Pohl puts us in his shoes and makes us walk around in them for a bit. This dude is a prick, not that he claims to be a beacon of kindness and selflessness. His treatment of Witeck is understanding, at first, but he quickly loses patience and tells the man to do his job, regardless of the possibility of his claims being true or even if he really is having a mental breakdown like the narrator thinks. Then there’s Carias, the narrator’s “right-hand man,” who doesn’t do much better, especially once he starts backing up Witeck’s claims. The narrator has no patience for such things and he’s already trying not to “process” the father who tried Jumping with his family where he stands. The narrator and Witeck have, by this point, killed or at least deported hundreds, if not thousands of people over the years of census-taking, and it seems today might be the day everything breaks. Mind you that Pohl was always to some degree on the left, certainly more progressive than the average liberal of the time—ironic, considering he would later cry out against the New Wave. Both politically and literarily Pohl gets a lot of work done with so few words, implying more often than stating things outright while also establishing the world of the story. Some points are left ambiguous, intentionally, but we get what Pohl is going for, which is to show the inherent inhumanity of playing border patrol, or playing population control. Of course, the most ambituous (indeed, the closest to mirror the world of “The Census Takers”) Malthusian project in the real world would be China’s one-child policy. One need only extrapolate a bit further beyond that accursed policy to see where Pohl is taking us. In the ’50s, the SF market was broad enough that a dark little nugget like “The Census Takers” could see print, and thank goodness for that.

There Be Spoilers Here

The situation with the “ambassador” gets to the point where Witeck feels the need to call the narrator by his first name: Jerry. “It was the first time in ten years, since I’d been promoted above him, that Witeck had dared call me by my first name.” This convinces Jerry that Witeck really has lost it, relieving him of his post and processing the so-called ambassador, who in turn, as if putting a hex on Jerry, says that the people on the surface of the globe will be wiped off the face of it. The people living at the Earth’s core will have their day. This is implied to be the case (or it could just be a few coincidences) when a series of natural disasters, from a tsunami to a volcanic eruption to geysers in Yellowstone Park, delay Jerry going on vacation. Witeck dies soon after being let go, supposedly a suicide, although as Carias points out he didn’t use his gun on himself. Strange. There are one or two loose ends, or rather dark corners that Pohl intentionally refrains from shining a light on. The effect is a little nightmarish.

A Step Farther Out

When I found this story I knew nothing about it, not least because it hasn’t been in print since the ’90s and thus remains sort of a hidden gem. I didn’t think it would read as timely as it did. Of course, it’s true that since the 19th century, even before the tightening of the US’s immigration policy in the 1920s, immigrants and migrant workers have had a tough lot in this country. The ruling class, serving patriarchy and white supremacy (what counts as “white” has expanded quite a bit over the past century), sees migrants as cheap and easily exploitable labor; and if there’s an issue, if someone were to raise a fuss, then that can be easily dealt with. Pohl was one of the great social commentators of ’50s SF, in a decade that seemed to be blessed with almost a surplus of great social commentators. “The Census Takers” is, as told from the oppressor’s (the capitalist’s, the white supremacist’s, the Zionist’s) point of view, a shot out of hell, a cry of impending vengeance on the part of the migrants and other dispossessed peoples; because at some point, sooner or later, such people will have no choice but to have their revenge or die under the oppressor’s boot. It’s only a matter of time before we too, in our world, see those we treat as subhuman, be they “south of the border” or halfway around the world, have their day of justice.

See you next time. And remember, fuck ICE!