Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

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

November 15th, 2024

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

Who Goes There?

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

Placing Coordinates

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

Enhancing Image

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

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

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

There Be Spoilers Here

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

A Step Farther Out

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

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell

November 11th, 2024

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

Who Goes There?

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

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

Placing Coordinates

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

Enhancing Image

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

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

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

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

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

There Be Spoilers Here

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

A Step Farther Out

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

See you next time.
The Observatory: This Is Not a Review

November 6th, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll be seeing you again, soon.
Novella Review: “Attitude” by Hal Clement

November 4th, 2024

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

Who Goes There?

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

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

Placing Coordinates

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

Enhancing Image

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

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

This will become important later.

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

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

There Be Spoilers Here

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

A Step Farther Out

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

See you next time.
Things Beyond: November 2024

November 1st, 2024
(Cover by Hisaki Yasuda. Asimov’s, May 1987.)

How are you doing?

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

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

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

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

For the novellas:
1. “Attitude” by Hal Clement. From the September 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. Feels like it’s been a while since we last talked about Clement, who was one of the first hard SF authors as we now think of the term. Not only was Clement a pioneer, he had a pretty long life and career, remaining active into the beginning of the 21st century. His prose is workmanlike and his human characters tend to be little more than abstractions, but his lectures-as-stories can be enthralling.
2. “Last Summer at Mars Hill” by Elizabeth Hand. From the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novella. Over the past four decades Hand has taken a kind of jack-of-all-trades approach to writing, tackling SF, fantasy, and horror seemingly with equal relish, with even the occasional movie novelization to her credit. (She wrote the novelization of the infamous 2003 Catwoman movie.) “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is one of her most decorated stories.
For the short stories:
1. “Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth. From the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales. Derleth was correspondents with H. P. Lovecraft and could be argued as the person most responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s legacy, as he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in 1939 firstly to reprint his mentor’s fiction. He also wrote quite a bit of fiction in his own right.
2. “The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell. From the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Suspense Stories. One of August Derleth’s biggest discoveries as editor was Ramsey Campbell, whose work Derleth had discovered when he was but a teenager. Campbell’s first collection was published when he was only 18, so that he got his start in weird fiction very early. He would later become a prolific horror novelist.
3. “Nomansland” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Aldiss debuted in the 1950s and would remain active pretty much until his death, which was not too long ago. He would win a Short Fiction Hugo for Hothouse, which is sort of a novel but also a collection of linked stories. We already covered the first story, and now we’re on the second.
4. “Flowers of Edo” by Bruce Sterling. From the May 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Sterling debuted in 1977 when he was barely out of his teens, but he would become one of the defining SF writers of the ’80s. While typically labeled as cyberpunk, Sterling has a surprising versatility, with even early novels like Schismatrix and Islands in the Net being very different from each other.
5. “Soft Clocks” by Yoshio Aramaki. From the January-February 1989 issue of Interzone. First published in 1968. Translated by Kazuko Behrens and Lewis Shiner. Seeing as how the Sterling story takes from Japanese culture, I thought it only right (and perhaps a neat gimmick) to follow up with a story from a Japanese writer. Yoshio Aramaki has been active since the ’60s as an author and critic.
6. “Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.
Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “Red as Blood” by Tanith Lee

October 31st, 2024

(Cover by Barclay Shaw. F&SF, July 1979.)

Who Goes There?

This marks Tanith Lee’s third consecutive Halloween appearnace on this site, and why not. I wouldn’t call myself a Lee fan (yet), but as I chip away at her massive body of work I do find more to appreciate. And I do mean massive. Over the span of five decades Lee wrote something like ninety novels and 300 short stories, so we’ll be here for a while. She debuted in the late ’60s, but did not gain attention until midway through the ’70s with novels like The Birthgrave and The Storm Lord. She specialized in horror and dark fantasy at a time when this only just being made possible due to the proliferation of the mass-market paperback; had Lee tried breaking through a decade earlier ~~she would’ve been ten years old or something~~ she would’ve surely been screwed, due to how the market was at the time. But she did get to thrive, and write some nifty fiction while she was at it. “Red as Blood” marked Lee’s first appearance in F&SF, which is weird because it seems like the two were made for each other. No matter. I feel like I’m giving the game away by saying this now, but “Red as Blood” is a pretty neat (if at times confusing) retelling of Snow White, in a way that screams Tanith Lee. Look, dark fantasy retellings were more novel in the ’70s.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1979 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted quite a number of times, including but not limited to The Year’s Best Fantasy: 6 (ed. Lin Carter), Young Monsters (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (ed. Richard Glyn Jones and A. Susan Williams), and the Lee collections Red as Blood, or Tales of the Sisters Grimmer and Tanith by Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee.

Enhancing Image

Once upon a time (it’s that kind of story) there was a king and his queen. The queen gave birth to a daughter, but died in childbirth. The queen (or the Queen) was also kind of an odd woman. “She never came to the window before dusk: she did not like the day.” She had black hair and dressed in a crimson gown, and had made a blood sacrifice (her own blood, not someone else’s) to gift her future daughter with certain traits, “hair black as mine, black as the wood of these warped and arcane trees. Let her have skin like mine, white as this snow. And let her have my mouth, red as my blood.” She got what she wanted, although she wouldn’t live to see her daughter grow up. The daughter is Bianca, and for the past seven years she’s been living with her stepmother, the Witch Queen. The Witch Queen is somehow both a witch and a devout Christian who is repulsed by Bianca’s aversion to churchgoing and Christian symbols; she’d much rather spend time in her garden. The thing is that her problems only just beginning.

So, this is a retelling of Snow White, as in “Snow White” by the Brothers Grimm, although we all know the Disney animated film. Lee would do this multiple times, so much that she made a whole collection of such retellings, but this was still fairly early in her career. The idea of making Bianca (Snow White) a vampire is a novel twist on the classic story. At least in the Disney film the relationship between the Witch Queen and Snow White is unclear, as the former is indeed a queen and the latter is some girl who lives in the woods, whereas in “Red as Blood” Bianca is explicitly the Witch Queen’s stepdaughter; it’s also implied the Queen was a vampire and that Bianca is following in her “true” mother’s footsteps. This is a curious role reversal because in the normal story we would see Bianca as the protagonist and the Witch Queen as the antagonist, but now the Witch Queen is not only the POV character but has the understandable goal of wanting to do something on her vampire daughter. Yet this is not a horror story! It’s dark fantasy, but Lee is not trying to scare us.

I have some theories as to what Lee is going for with this story, because this is not just a case of “What if we told this classic fairy tale but it’s FUCKED UP?,” which makes a lot of fairy tale retellings dull. No, she clearly wrote it with thematic purpose—only I’m not totally sure to what end. There’s a surprising amount of Christian symbolism going on that only intensifies as we get closer to the end. This is also a short story, so there’s only so much ground to cover, and the fact that it’s a fairy tale everyone knows (albeit with a twist or two) means it’s hard to spoil. Lee doesn’t exactly make Bianca’s vampirism a secret, the implications she drops being so heavy as to be fucking anvils. You can’t possibly miss it. But part of the fun of reading this story, aside from the beauty of Lee’s controlled, almost Bible-inspired prose, is seeing the Witch Queen, from her perspective, realize that she has one hell of a problem child on her hands. When she asks her magic mirror what the mirror sees it says it specifically can’t see Bianca. Get it? Vampires don’t have reflections? When her mother was alive there was an epidemic of “wasting sickness” in the kingdom, which was never explained and which they never found a cure for; and when Bianca comes of age (gets her first period), the “wasting sickness” starts up again.

Well this is a problem.

The Witch Queen hires a huntsman to take care of her stepdaughter, but as with the fairy tale it takes all of five minutes for the deal to backfire—only this time Bianca outright kills the huntsman and sucks his blood (he doesn’t seem to mind too much). If I had to quibble about something I do find it concerning that Bianca is depicted (at least analogous to) sexually active and desirable… at 13 years old. This is a recurring thing in ’70s SFF writing and I don’t know if we should blame Michel Foucault or what. It makes me cringe, although for what it’s worth nothing explicit happens in this case. So the huntsman is dead and the Witch Queen has to come up with a plan B, which involves making a deal with a most unusual party: Satan himself. Or more accurately Lucifer, the fallen angel. Lucifer works up a disguise for the Witch Queen that Bianca will be certain to fall for, and we can guess well in advance that the Witch Queen will become an old hag somehow. So. As for the seven dwarves Snow White befriends they’re represented here by trees in Bianca’s garden, which come to life. The only weakness the Witch Queen knows of is that Bianca finds Christian iconography repellant, maybe to the point of it being maybe physically harmful.

There Be Spoilers Here

The climax of “Red as Blood” starts weird and only gets weirder from there, to the point where it becomes honestly mind-bending. The Witch Queen gives Bianca an apple, although it turns out to not be poisoned; instead it contained (I don’t know how, maybe through witch stuff) a wafer, “a fragment of the flesh of Christ.” How Catholic. So Bianca dies and is put in a transparent glass coffin, which may sound familiar, where she lies until a prince (just a prince, from where I don’t know) comes along and revives her. It’s implied, via a mark on his wrist, “like a star,” that he is the embodiment of Christ. (People often forget Jesus would have been nailed through the wrists, not the hands, a mistake even Christmonger and antisemite Mel Gibson makes.) The bad news is that Bianca is back, but it seems the love of the prince transforms her, into a series of birds before time goes backwards to when she was seven years old—only this time not a vampire. The prince had not only reversed time but seemingly cured Bianca of her vampirism. This is… confusing. Obviously it’s meant to be taken as allegorical, and it’s so overtly Christian that I have to wonder if it’s maybe satirical, or maybe if Lee was actually a churchgoer. I’m not sure if she was religious or not, truth be told. The Witch Queen is a Christian who ultimately is in the right, but she also had to seek Lucifer’s help to deal with Bianca’s vampirism, which is certainly odd. It could be that Lee is saying we need that bit of darkness, or that there’s some evil lurking in every one of us. Or maybe, when the chips are down, we must side with a lesser evil.

A Step Farther Out

I’m a bit weary at the idea of reading a whole collection of fairy tale retellings, but as an individual story I think “Red as Blood” is quite strong. Again it’s surprising it took until 1979 for Lee to get published in F&SF, but the pairing was perfect. The more I read Lee the more I understand what she’s going for, which actually makes me wonder if I had treated “Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Fleu” unfairly when I reviewed that a couple years ago. I was not as familiar with Lee at the time.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” by Charles L. Grant

October 27th, 2024

(Cover by Chesley Bonestell. F&SF, March 1978.)

Who Goes There?

Every time I’ve encountered Charles L. Grant’s stuff I’ve been indifferent at best, which is a shame because he really did put in the work. From the ’70s until his untimely death (only a few days after his 54th birthday), Grant was a prolific practitioner of dark fantasy, spooky science fiction, and what he called “quiet” horror. Grant’s brand of horror doesn’t seek to gross out or even scare the reader in the conventional sense, but to invoke a certain uneasy atmosphere; this is one way of saying his stories can be very moody, in a way that for some reason does not appeal to me. Not to say he was a bad writer; he clearly exceled in his wheelhouse, just that I find said wheelhouse to be a case of style over substance. It says something that other than his Nebula-winning story “A Crowd of Shadows” I would say today’s story is my favorite from Grant, but I still didn’t care for it. Obviously some people did care, at least at the time: “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” got a World Fantasy Award nomination. It’s also set in the perpetually haunted Connecticut town of Oxrun Station, a favorite fictional locale for Grant, although for some reason the folks at ISFDB have not yet added this story as an entry in that series despite it being explicitly set there.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1978 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VII (ed. Gerald W. Page), Horrorstory: Volume Three (ed. Gerald W. Page and Karl Edward Wagner), and the Grant collection A Glow of Candles and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

Nels Anderson has moved with his family to a farm in Oxrun Station, suppoedly to get some fresh country air but really as a way to distract Nels from business problems. He’s with his wife Kelly, and his three daughters, Grace, Abbey, and Bess; he loves all his daughters, of course, but it becomes apparent that Abbey, the middle child, is his favorite. The thing is that Abbey is no longer a child—none of them are. We’re talking eighteen to twenty. Nels’s daughters are at that age where they have every right to go chasing after boys, although Nels is not ready for this—not that he wants to admit it. The narrative is thus broken up between present-day life on the farm and unattributed conversations between Nels and Kelly, which seem to be flashbacks, in which the two mostly discuss their love life and their relationship with the kids. We learn they were hoping for a son, hence them having three daughters instead of one or two. We learn Rose is Abbey’s middle name, in a bit of obvious symbolism. We also learn Abbey sometimes have nightmares, about dying, which are serious enough that her parents express concern about them. As for life on the farm, Abbey is miserable, although she’s not quick to say so, life on the farm not being what she had hoped for. She wants to appease her dad but there’s only so much she can do. Thus we have a family drama which doesn’t seem to have any horror elements, or anything supernatural going on; since this was published in F&SF we can guess something will happen, but as is typical of his work, Grant is slow to show his hand.

It could be that I’ve seen this kind of story before and that a lot has changed since the ’70s (but also not enough has changed), but I wasn’t terribly interested in Nels’s dilemma with how he should treat Abbey. There is the faintest hint that Nels is possessive of his daughter because he’s in love with her himself, and this incestuous urge is too shameful to be spoken of, but if that was an implication on Grant’s part then there’s no payoff for it. A father who is unwilling to let his 19-year-old daughter live her own life is not in itself an uncommon case, but given the conversations the two have it’s implied that no man would satisfy Nels as Abbey’s daughter because he projects himself onto the boyfriend role. This is all but confirmed when three young men (one man for each daughter) come to the property, drunk, with one saying he’s here to take Grace on a date. Grace herself says that the men had previously harassed her and Bess, and would not take no for an answer. Now, in fairness if I was a parent and three complete strangers came to my home saying they were here for a date with my kids, I would be quite skeptical. Given that the boys are being threatening, and decidedly not sober, Nels has a choice: he can try to either deescalate, or give these boys an ass-kicking. He picks the latter. This choice is framed as not the wisest of things to do, but it’s also totally understandable, and frankly it’s hard to blame Nels for kicking the men off his property. Of course, since this is ostensibly a horror story we know things will only get worse, and that the three men will figure back into the plot somehow.

Maybe this would have been more effective had it not been so short (a dozen magazine pages that go by quickly) and had it seemed like Nels had more of a choice in the course of events. Like what is he supposed to do here? The obvious point Grant wants to make is that Nels obsesses over his daughters too much and Abbey in particular, but if there’s any abuse, we don’t see it. Apparently Abbey declined to go to a high-class college so she could stay close to her family, instead (if the flashback is anything to go by) going to a local community college, which we’re told is a bad thing. Okay. What exactly is wrong with going to community college? Could you maybe illustrate more clearly to us how Abbey’s codependant relationship with her dad has made her life worse? We are told, but not really shown, that Nels is doing the wrong thing. Maybe if he had an incestuous crush on his own daughter and is trying to keep her all to himself like that then there would be a real problem, but while (like I said) there’s the faintest hint of this being the case, Grant doesn’t follow through on it. The other thing is that Nels’s unhealthy relationship with his daughter is set up to have tragic and unforeseen consequences, albeit telegraphed through Abbey’s nightmares about her dying. We all have dreams about dying, but in the context of this story Abbey’s nightmares are taken as premonitions, as if there’s something different and supernatural about them, despite nothing being shown that this is the case. I could go on for a minute, but my point is that the story’s attempt at building dread is unearned.

There Be Spoilers Here

Nels’s harsh treatment of the three men comes back to bite the family, or so it seems. The five of them go on a picnic when, from somewhere distant, a shot rings out. Then another. Kelly is wounded in the shooting and Abbey is killed, perhaps as the latter had predicted she might be. Presumably one of the men had taken to sniping at the family, but nobody sees the shooter and the three men are never arrested, on account of having lullabies. What started as a vacation home becomes a tragic memory. It isn’t until the very end that the story turns supernatural—maybe. Nels refuses to leave the farm, with the rest of the family even leaving him behind. He is unable to go. He talks to a big tree, the one Abbey had clung too as he died, and he hears her voice in his head. “Turnabout, father, is not always fair,” she says. She wanted to leave the farm, but now she’s stuck here, as a spirit tied to the tree. Of course, there’s nothing to prove that this isn’t just Nels talking to himself in his mind. Again I’m left wondering, what was Nels supposed to do here? Have the family leave the farm early? Send Abbey back home? Grant interrogates his protagonist but does not provide an alternate course of action. I don’t get it.

A Step Farther Out

Nope, can’t say I was a fan.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight” by Avram Davidson

October 24th, 2024

(Cover by David Palladini. F&SF, April 1977.)

Who Goes There?

As we approach the climax of this year-long tribute to F&SF, it’s about time we cover an author who was also one-time editor of that magazine. There’ve been a few writers who also picked up the editing torch with F&SF (Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and most recently Sheree Renée Thomas), but Avram Davidson might’ve been the most prepped to become editor, although his tenure would be short. He debuted in F&SF in 1954 with “My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello” and would remain a quirky presence in that magazine (among others) for many years to come. By the time he became editor in 1962 he was already a Hugo winner, for his 1958 SF-horror story “Or All the Seas with Oysters.” Under Davidson F&SF took on a rather different character from both before and after, making it something of a black sheep era for the magazine. After he stepped down from editing Davidson went back to writing regularly, with a vengeance. Known mostly for standalone stories, Davidson started the episodic Jack Limekiller series in the ’70s, of which today’s story is the second entry. “Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight” shows its age nowadays, and its big twist is obvious (perhaps by design), but it does have, as Edward L. Ferman says, quite the atmosphere.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Year’s Finest Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr), Under South American Skies (ed. Gardner Dozois and Mike Resnick), Modern Classics of Fantasy (ed. Gardner Dozois), and the Davidson collections Limekiller! and The Avram Davidson Treasury.

Enhancing Image

The first question is, who is Jack Limekiller? He’s a Canadian expat, apparently from Toronto, which goes to explain a lot. The Limekiller stories have a strong international flavor, being set in “British Hidalgo” (there’s also an independent sister country called Spanish Hidalgo “though it had not been Spain’s for a century and a half”), a fictional South American country that, despite these stories being set very much post-World War II (although not much more specific than that), is still under British guardianship. What does Limekiller do for a living? Not sure. Supposedly he deals in trading, but for the whole course of this story he’s not doing work at all; on the contrary, he spends some of it thinking of ways to avoid his creditors. He has some debt he’s not currently able to pay off. The good news is that despite the inherent exploitation required in maintaining a colony like British Hidalgo, and also the fact (this is not a spoiler really) that “Manatee Gal” will turn into borderline Lovecraftian horror down the road, things are easy-going here. Limekiller’s main creditor will probably catch up with him, but not tonight, or tomorrow either. He’s a bit of a wish-fulfillment character, in that he is too individualistic (and maybe too drunk) to work a 9-to-5 job, but he’s still very cool and sociable, and we know in advance that he’ll come out of whatever weird situation Davidson tosses his way basically unscathed. Everybody around Limekiller, on the other hand…

Something tricky Davidson does in the first few pages is set up the first of a few mysteries, the only thing being we’re unlikely to take it as a mystery that needs solving. Bob Blaine, a notorious trader in these parts, has gone missing. This will not come up again until much later, so put a pin in that one. This is less about the plot and more about the place and characters. British Hidalgo is somewhere in South America but seems as home to Caribbeans and white Europeans, including folks like Limekiller. The most elusive of these characters would have to be John Samuel, a white Creole with one eye, and Captain Cudgel, a mysterious old man who frequents the same bar Limekiller goes to. Cudgel is more of a walking mystery while Samuel is a bit of an eccentric; it’s a shame I can barely understand what the latter is saying. A problem I encountered almost immediately here is that most of the characters have some kind of “accent,” and Davidson writes them out phonetically—maybe a little too much. Davidson traveled around a lot, in fact if I remember right he edited F&SF while living in Mexico, which posed a problem; but that doesn’t automatically give one license to give non-white (or also in this case, as with Samuel, white characters who are not from the US or Canada) goofy accents that are hard to parse. He even does the “t’ing” thing for Caribbean characters, except he applies that logic to seemingly every other word, the result being a meaty novelette that’s rather chatty, and much of that dialogue is hard to read.

“Manatee Gal” has a loose plot, made up more of episodes than a cohesive narrative, so with that said my favorite part is one that is only very loosely related to the overarching mystery, in which Limekiller (seemingly because he has nothing better to do) gets taken on a ride to Shiloh, the remnants of a Confederate colony that had been founded in British Hidalgo over a century, and which still hosts a small group of people who are making a decent living. The colony “had not been wiped out in a year or two, like the Mormon colonies in Mexico—there had been no Revolution here, no gringo-hating Villistas—it had just ebbed away.” But still there’s something left. Colonialism always leaves scars. Of course, Limekiller and Davidson don’t seriously question the ghost-like presence colonialism has on the land, the past haunting the present. The idea seems to be that these expats and settlers will eventually wither away, as with Shiloh, or get killed off (burn out or fade away, your choice), but then, while the dinosaurs did go extinct, they left a certain feathered animal behind as their legacy. British Hidalgo is a scarred land, and clearly haunted, but not just by supernatural creatures. The double-edged sword of Davidson’s setting is that because it’s fictitious it also means Davidson is free to put his thumb on the scales, so to speak. There is no place on Earth quite like British Hidalgo, which does lend a surreal quality to it, perfect for supernatural shenanigans, but also it’s ultimately a white author’s exotic fantasy land.

There Be Spoilers Here

Manatees get brought up from time to time throughout the story. Sea-cows. They’re cute, harmless marine mammals, but Davidson also raises kind of an odd question: There are all kinds of were-animals, not just werewolves, so why not a were-manatee? Someone who is amphibious, who can change between a person on land and a manatee in the water, just off the coast. They do eventually find Bob Blaine—or what’s left of him. Something had killed him. We never see the were-manatee, but the implication is that Samuel is the killer, although he is never seen again. Limekiller connects some dots and comes to the conclusion that such a creature could exist, here, in British Hidalgo. But of course that’s not his problem. Limekiller’s debt problem also clears itself up at the last minute, as a freak accident has led to his trading position (namely his boat) becoming very sought after again. All’s well ends well, more or less. Nothing will fundamentally change. We would see Limekiller again, even I don’t.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve not read a great deal of Avram Davidson for the simple reason I find him to be a little too quirky and at times misogynistic (basically the same reason I don’t often read R. A. Lafferty), and admittedly “Manatee Gal” might be too obtuse for a story with ultimately such a straightforward reveal. I also get the impression that, given Limekiller is wearing a thick coat of plot armor with this series, there’s no real sense of danger. Limekiller comes upon a mystery or two, connects a few dots, goes “Well that’s weird,” and moves on, perhaps taking comfort in the knowledge that said weirdness won’t happen to him. I also struggle to believe the exoticism of the locale would fly as well if published today, but judging by awards attention for this and future Limekiller stories there was clearly an audience for it back in ye olden times. I’m also pretty sure Lucius Shepard read it and got a few ideas, so you could say it’s influential in kind of a niche way.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “My Boat” by Joanna Russ

October 20th, 2024

(Cover by David Hardy. F&SF, January 1976.)

Who Goes There?

It’s been a hot minute since I last talked about Joanna Russ on this site, although it has in fact not been long since I last wrote about her period. I reviewed her 1971 story “Poor Man, Beggar Man” for Young People Read Old SFF, and I wasn’t a fan of it. I have mixed feelings on Russ’s fiction (although not her criticism, which I generally love), in part because it seems to me that she wrote her fiction with the intention of it being more studied than enjoyed; and I think fiction, if nothing else, should be read for pleasure—even if it’s a morbid kind of pleasure, like reading horror for the sake of feeling scared or unnerved. The Russ stories I like most tend to be fun, but with a venomous bite that also lurks in her criticism. It’s why I have yet to read her supposed magnum opus, The Female Man, because frankly it doesn’t look like a very fun novel. Russ’s seriousness (with some sardonic humor) paid off in the long run, though, as ten years after her death she’s now one of the most studied and lauded of the New Wave writers, even recently getting a Library of America volume. As with some of Russ’s other fiction I enjoyed thinking about today’s story more than actually reading it, which is not to say I don’t recommend it. “My Boat” is ostensibly horror and set in the Cthulhu Mythos, but while it’s a bit of horror and a bit of fantasy, it could be described more accurately as fantastic metafiction. It’s a story about a story, more about the Mythos than set in it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has been reprinted in The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF (ed. Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim), The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 22nd Series (ed. Edward L. Ferman), Sorcerers! (ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois), Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (editor uncredited), and the Russ collection The Zanzibar Cat.

Enhancing Image

Jim is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter on the phone with Milt, his agent, about a story—not a script story but something from Jim’s early life which for some reason he is compelled to share now. “It’s something that happened to me in high school in 1952 and I just want to tell someone. I don’t care if no station from here to Indonesia can use it; you just tell me whether I’m nuts or not, that’s all.” Two decades earlier, when Jim was 17, his high school became one of the first in the state to integrate; segregation had been the norm up to this point, and would continue to be the norm for most of the country for the coming decade. In 1952 the civil rights movement was still in utero; it was the year Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man hit store shelves, but otherwise there was no MLP, no Malcolm X, James Baldwin had not yet broken through as a novelist, the “race issue” was talked about but there was no mobilization yet. Emmett Till was very much alive (he would be 83 today). Jim recalls that when his high school integrated only a handful of black kids came in initially, and Cissie Jackson was one of them—a scrawny 15-year-old girl who seemed like she wouldn’t amount to anything but who was, almost in spite of her physical limitations, a gifted actress. She was a drama club regular. She was also supposedly crazy. Her father had been murdered, which if anything made her more world-weary.

You know Malcolm X saw his father killed by white men when he was four and that made him a militant for life? Well, Cissie’s father had been shot down in front of her eyes when she was a little kid—we learned that later on—only it didn’t make her militant; it just made her so scared of everybody and everything that she’d withdraw into herself and wouldn’t speak to anybody for weeks on end. Sometimes she’d withdraw right out of this world and then they’d send her to the loony bin; believe me, it was all over school in two days. And she looked it; she’d sit up there in the school theater—oh, Milty, the Island high schools had money, you better believe it!—and try to disappear into the last seat like some little scared rabbit. She was only four eleven anyhow, and maybe eighty-five pounds sopping wet.

Then there’s a white friend of Jim’s, Alan, who was a bit of a weirdo, being into Lovecraft at a time when this was very much not a cool thing to like. Lovecraft’s legacy had already been more or less secured at this point, but Alan would’ve been almost certainly branded as an outcast, a 17-year-old boy who was into cosmic horror and weird fiction. Maybe it’s because they were both outcasts, albeit in different ways, but Alan and Cissie took a liking to each other, becoming friends with Jim as the third wheel. “She got better and better friends with Al, and when they let me tag along, I felt privileged. He loaned her some of those crazy books of his and I overheard things about her life, bits and pieces.” Cissie comes from a very religious household, with a very strict mother. Of course it’s hard to blame Cissie’s mom for being so uptight, being wife to a murdered husband and mother to a girl who is entering a newly integrated school. One quibble I have with this story, or I suppose one way it shows its age, is the way Cissie’s mental illness is discussed, or rather how it is not. It’s pretty clear Cissie has PTSD at the very least, although Jim doesn’t use that term and it wouldn’t have been part of his vocabulary. Despite being the character upon whom the plot hinges Cissie is kept totally closed off from us, as a person, which is part of the point, but it also—I guess “exoticizes” is a fine enough word for it. Her mental illness is exoticized and made to be part of the “weirdness” of the story, which I don’t think would go over well today. Some of her dialogue can also border on caricatured, although Russ means well, and anyway you could make the excuse that this is merely Jim’s recollecting of events. It’s possible Cissie did not talk like how Jim makes her sound.

I called “My Boat” fantastic metafiction, but it’s also very much allegorical, a fact that only becomes more apparent as the story progresses. Jim is telling Milt, his agent, this story as if it had literally happened, but it becomes increasingly clear to the reader (if not poor Milt) that Jim is sort of talking in code; maybe he really believes in the strange events he’s about to relate, but these events also stand in for something that would’ve happened in the normal world. The friendship sparked between Alan and Cissie might be developing into something more, which would’ve been taboo at the time, to the point where both could’ve been killed if their relationship was discovered. They trusted Jim enough to have him tag along as the third wheel, although by Jim’s own admission he was barely aware enough of racial strife at the time to understand what their relationship could’ve meant. Jim as a grown man in his thirties doesn’t seem to think fondly of his younger self, calling him a “run-of-the-mill, seventeen-year-old, white, liberal racist” who was simply not as open-minded as Alan. I wouldn’t say Jim is an autobiographical sketch of Russ, because aside from the gender difference there are too many other basic differences between the two (for one I’m sure Russ would shudder at the thought of writing for Hollywood), but he could be read as Russ criticizing her own upbringing. Russ was a leftist, but the thing is that most leftists were not brought up that way; maybe they were raised liberal, or like me they were raised conservative. Regardless adopting leftist politics is a long and rather winding process, and part of that process is admitting that the ideology of your parents is inadequate for dealing with real-world problems. Jim was raised liberal, but this did not prepare him for two of his friends falling in love.

This brings us to My Boat, which is the name of a rowboat with only one oar, a kind of secret place for Cissie and Alan, and which Jim is allowed to visit one day. Of course it turns out to be much more than a rowboat—rather it acts as a gateway into other parts of the world, across different periods of history, and even maybe to other worlds. In what is admittedly a confusing development Cissie and Alan take on different personae, becoming full-grown adults before Jim’s eyes and taking on the guises of historical figures. Cissie becomes the Queen of Sheba (although she says it’s Saba) while Alan becomes Francis Drake. A warrior queen and an explorer. Al’s fondness for Lovecraft, the way Lovecraft’s works expanded his imagination, allowed him to come along with Cissie, and in this sense Russ is celebrating Lovecraft. Mind you that even in the ’70s it was not unheard of to denounce Lovecraft as a reactionary, racist, etc., as Michael Moorcock’s essay “Starship Stormtroopers” came out a year after “My Boat.” Moorcock saw Lovecraft as massively overrated, never mind problematic, while Russ seems to understand Lovecraft’s limitations (as both a person and writer) while also showing that she’s read enough of his work out of what has to be a genuine fondness. “My Boat” is about a few things: racism, regret, memory, and of course how fiction might bleed into our reality—not as in the Cthulhu Mythos might become real but rather how the Mythos might inspire someone. Of course the Mythos wasn’t even called that until after Lovecraft’s death (courtesy of August Derleth), and “My Boat” is too metafictional (and I would say too not-horror) to be thrown in with the classic Mythos stories. It’s a story that struggles with categorization.

There Be Spoilers Here

The tragedy of the situation is that Jim turned down going along with Cissie and Alan on their magical boat. “I didn’t want that knowledge, Milt. I didn’t want to go that deep. It was the kind of thing most seventeen-year-olds don’t learn for years: Beauty. Despair. Mortality. Compassion. Pain.” The door had been closed on him, or rather he had refused to open it, much to his regret. He never saw Cissie again after that day. He did eventually see Alan again, twenty years later, the strange part being that Alan had not aged during that time: he was still that 17-year-old. (I wanna point out that there’s no science-fictional explanation for any of this, and that if what Jim says is true then this story is firmly in the realm of fantasy, not SF.) After Cissie and Alan went missing Jim got to meet Cissie’s mom, who was not the Aunt Jemima caricature he had in his head: she was scrawny and nerve-wracked, like her daughter, and very much human. Jim as an adult chastises his younger self’s unconscious racism. In recent years Jim has taken to reading up on Marxism and feminism, apparently having shifted more to the left end of the political spectrum. He’s also been reading Lovecraft. The ending is bittersweet, or rather bitter with a little ray of hope, that maybe it’s not too late for Jim to get back in touch with Cissie—wherever she’s gone. Surely she couldn’t have left him behind forever.

A Step Farther Out

Do you need to be familiar with Lovecraft’s works to “get” what “My Boat” is going for? Not really, although Russ makes references that would otherwise go over one’s head. For example I’ve not yet read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, so I’m not sure how Russ incorporates it into her narrative. I’m not exactly a fan of Lovecraft, so I mostly read “My Boat” on its own terms. It’s not really a horror story, and it isn’t scary except maybe in an existential sense; what it really does well is tell a story about an interracial couple, a mutual friend of the two young lovers, and give such an earthly story metafictional implications.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign” by Manly Wade Wellman

October 17th, 2024

(Cover by Chesley Bonestell. F&SF, March 1975.)

Who Goes There?

There’s something to be said about the longevity of Manly Wade Wellman’s career—not just the sheer length of it (half a century) but how long Wellman was able to retain respect and an inviting readership, from the ’30s until his death in 1986. Wellman was actually born outside the US, in Portuguese West Africa (what is now Angola), but his family moved to the US when he was very young and he would eventually adopt North Carolina as his home state—a fact that would influence much of his fiction. Like most interesting writers, Wellman is a man with some internal contradictions: he played football in college but wanted to write poetry; he was a neo-Confederate but some of his stories read as anti-racist, and he respected the cultural practices of the indigenous peoples in the land of his birth. He was also apparently biracial, being white but also with some Native American ancestry. At the time “The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign” came out, Wellman had been in the game for over forty years, yet he was about to win the inaugural World Fantasy Award for Best Collection with his horror collection Worse Things Waiting. Today’s story is pretty short, and minor Wellman (didn’t stop it from getting a World Fantasy Award nomination), but it also shows Wellman in his natural habitat, so to speak.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 22nd Series (ed. Edward L. Ferman), 100 Fiendish Little Nightmares (ed. Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg), The World Fantasy Awards: Volume II (ed. Fritz Leiber and Stuart David Schiff), and the Wellman collections The Valley So Low: Southern Mountain Stories and The Devil Is Not Mocked and Other Warnings.

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The opening paragraph of this story might be the very best part, truth be told, for its compression of backstory, elegance of style (Wellman is a much more delicate prose stylist than most of his generation), and who Wellman is asking us to sympathize with. Jack Bowdry has been tried but acquitted for murder, for the death of Kib Wordin, a local eccentric Jack accused of being a “witch-man” and whom Jack supposedly killed after Kib refused to leave town. Jack has killed a man before the story even gets started, in what may or may not have been self-defense, and so it may come as a surprise to the reader that he’s also gonna be Our Hero™. Well, more like anti-hero. Jack is mostly an easy-going rural type, set to get hitched to a much younger woman, Tolly, who’s 20 to Jack’s 34, although Tolly’s father is “more educated” and keeps quite a few books in him home, some of them being on rather arcane subject matter. Normally with this kind of folkloric horror story the protagonist would have to be eased into the idea of accepting witches, demons, and the like, but Jack starts out as superstitious, and luckily for him his superstitions have some weight in reality. He had killed Kib with a silver bullet, which may sound odd because we then expect Kib to have been a werewolf; thing is I’m not sure when the whole silver bullet thing became a mainstay in werewolf lore, because here Kib turns out to be a normal dude. Why silver, then? We’re also told at the beginning that Kib lived in a red cabin with a “creepy” tree nearby, a very old one, and that a witch-man had lived on that property before him.

And then another witch-man before that…

Because of this story’s brevity and the obviousness of its twist, it’s hard to talk about for too long, especially before getting into spoilers; but also we’re not here necessarily for the twist, or even the scares themselves, but the strong atmosphere Wellman evokes. Said atmosphere is sort of like the more dreamlike moments in William Faulkner’s writing, a vaguely hallucinatory Southern gothic vibe that retains a genuineness in no small part because Wellman had lived in North Carolina for two decades or so at this point. It’s very rustic, the kind of in-between place where white Christianity and indigenous beliefs would clash and mix together. Jack is a Christian who also believes that pagan beliefs are rooted in things which may actually have hold over this world. He is understandably concerned when he looks through his own modest library and finds a book he knows was not there before: Albertus Magnus, or White and Black Magic for Man and Beast. Somebody had also left a gold eagle here, like it’s an insignia. He consults his Bible, although rather than a specific passage he flips to three at random: Psalms, Acts, and Revelation. The line from Acts, “…cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians,” refers to Diana of the Roman pantheon. Of course in the Bible the old gods are denounced, but the line taken out of context sounds like genuine praise of Diana—of the old pagan ways. Diana is the goddess of hunting and nature, although as Jack notes, she’s not merciful like the Abrahamic God; rather she could be very petty, as the old gods tend to be. “Ain’t what sounds like a good goddess to worship,” Jack says. Little bit of humor there. He talks with Tolly about these strange things at his house and the signs his Bible gave him, and while it might’ve been tempting to make Tolly herself secretly a witch, she only knows some Expositionese because her father studies mythology and the occult. We never see the dad.

There Be Spoilers Here

Not content with having gotten away with murder, Jack takes an ax and journeys out to the cabin where Kib had lived, although not being seeing some strange shape (possibly human, possibly animal) scurry off his property. Jack and Tolly bury Albertus Magnus, as a good Christian is supposed to do with such a book, before Jack notices that the tree on the property does not look right. He tries chopping down the tree, but the tree does not agree with this procedure, in a scene that honestly reminds me of a certain infamous scene from The Evil Dead. Obviously the idea of a tree coming to life (well, more to life than it should) and exercising its tree-fingers was by no means a new idea, even in 1975. Thankfully Tolly comes in to help with a shotgun, which for some reason she added to with silver coins. What does the silver mean here? Is it supposed to have a special effect? Regardless the tree goes down, and takes the cabin with it. The first and more obvious twist is that the tree is the thing giving the property its bad aura, which makes sense since Diana is a nature goddess. The second twist, and this interests me the more I think about it, is that since Jack killed the witch-man who lived in the cabin he’s the next in line. The tree is fueled by worship, but it also demands an occasional sacrifice, and Jack has some darker qualities which could serve him well in a villainous role. Wellman here is admitting that his protagonist is by no means an angel, and that he could be tempted to server evil instead of good. Thankfully Jack resists, and ultimately is rewarded for it, as the ancient evil of the property retreats and some cloaked, unnamed figures (presumably worshipers of Diana) leave town.

A Step Farther Out

No big surprises with this one, but it was a very pleasant read. Wellman was in his seventies at this point, but still had a fine touch and a sense of environment—you could say a level of focus that most writers his age simply wouldn’t have anymore. Robert Heinlein was writing some of his very worst material and coasting on what was admittedly an impressive career when he was Wellman’s age. “The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign” is not really scary, but it’s good old-fashioned rural horror.

See you next time.