Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Short Story Review: “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” by E. Lily Yu

May 10th, 2024

(Cover by Kirby Fagan. Uncanny, Sept-Oct 2016.)

Who Goes There?

We don’t know much about E. Lily Yu. We don’t even know what the “E.” in her name stands for, or at least I can’t find a source on it; her own site doesn’t mention it. We don’t know when she was born either, but given that she graduated from Princeton in 2012 we can make an educated guess. Incidentally she received the Astounding Award for Best New Writer that same year, off the strength of a couple very strong short stories. Since then she has written one novel, a short story collection, plus an essay collection. “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” is a fable, or rather a fairy tale sort of in the style of Hans Christian Andersen, but with a more explicitly feminist bent. This one is a little upsetting to read, truth be told, because of how vividly it depicts an abusive relationship and a woman’s disillusionment; but it’s also written in a style that is (for the most part) in keeping with the tradition.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September-October 2016 issue of Uncanny Magazine, which you can read here. It was then reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (ed. Jonathan Strahan), The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (ed. Charles Yu), The Best of Uncanny (ed. Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas), and the Yu collection Jewel Box. Pretty good for a more recent story.

Enhancing Image

The story is about a witch, “neither very old nor very young,” and as the narrator tells us, “she had not been born a witch.” She went through a few jobs first and took on the role of witch, learning the arts, living a secluded life in a hut on Orion Waste, so named after a fallen star. The setting is for the most part your typical medieval fantasy setting, albeit with a tinge of the post-apocalyptic and couched in a style of narration that makes it clear from the outset we’re reading a story. The witch herself seems close to being aware she’s playing a part in a fable, and there are a couple side characters who are mentioned as taking part in other stories—which of course we hear nothing about, but this is a fantasy world that is decidedly and completely removed from the real world. The style Yu employs here makes sense for both the material and for someone would’ve been very young still when she was writing it, as the fable is a mode that’s easy to learn but hard to master; it’s not as demanding as trying to emulate the Bible, or even Hemingway, but it takes a talented writer to squeeze fresh juice out of this fruit. As such Yu assumes (correctly) that the reader has at least a cursory knowledge of how traditional fairy tales work and proceeds from there while also having some fun with it, such as a light meta touch.

The witch takes on the companionship of a knight, with the former seeing the latter as worthy of admiration and the latter seeing the former as useful. Right away we get the feeling something isn’t right with this relationship, but the witch is blinded both by her feelings for the knight and the fact that she hesitates to use a certain tool that would’ve prevented this whole oncoming trouble. You see, the witch had inherited a magic bell, “forged from cuckoo spit, star iron, and lightning glass, which if warmed in the mouth showed, by signs and symbols, true things.” The problem is that using the bell renders the witch ill to the point of being bedridden, so it’s only something to be used in dire situations. It’s a shame, because the knight is not without his merits; he is brave, and he does try to take on the dragons that his profession calls for, but he proves to be simply not strong enough to take on these beasts alone. The witch goes through great pains to save the knight, but is not rewarded for it; instead the knight berates her, being clearly envious of her talent, and even later in the story threatens to kill her if she “takes the credit” again. The knight does not see the witch as fully human but rather as a utility, to be discarded if deemed too inconvenient or if her usefulness runs out. And yet the witch stands by the knight; she can’t bring herself to hate him, or even to articulate the ways in which he mistreats her.

The witch is a woman, but the knight never treats her as such. Historically, in the real world, witchcraft has been associated with women’s evil ways, and while witchcraft is not an exclusively female practice and women aren’t the only people to suffer from witch hunts (Giles Corey sure died for it), a woman being accused of witchcraft is like a woman under patriarchy being accused of promiscuity. To help make this point, Yu introduces us to the lady (mind you that none of these characters have names), whom the knight rescues after the witch has defeated another dragon. The lady is everything the knight expects out of a “good” woman: conventionally attractive and pure as snow, not given to wickedness. Unfortunately the lady is also a real bitch, and it doesn’t take long for her to whisper sweet nothings in the knight’s ear and convince him to kill the witch while she isn’t looking—something the witch luckily overhears. I will say that things at this point get a bit confusing since there aren’t any breaks between scenes and the third-person narrator seems to jump between characters’ perspectives carelessly by the time the lady is introduced. It doesn’t make the story difficult so much as unnecessarily hard to untangle at times; it gives the impression of unprofessionalism, or at least that one more go through the manuscript would’ve been nice. Ultimately these are quibbles, given the story’s power otherwise; just wanted to point them out since they stuck out to me initially.

There Be Spoilers Here

When I started reading this story I assumed the “boy knight” of the title would be an actual boy and not a man (how stupid of me), and yet I ended up not being that far off. The witch’s bell reveals that a curse had been put on the knight, such that while physically a man he’s still a young boy on the inside, which goes to explain his erratic behavior and lack of capacity to empathize with anyone. The lady, for her part, is also cursed, such that once she has her hands on someone she can’t have them, though it’s unclear at first what this could mean in practical terms. The witch pities both of them, although what’s interesting is that for both Yu and the witch the curses put on these people do not absolve them of their wrongdoings. The twist of the knight’s condition also comments on the immaturity inherent in misogyny, about how a misogynistic tendency always reveals a lack of maturity and capacity to empathize with other people in the misogynist. (Needless to say this also applies to transmisogyny.) I say this with clarity as someone with a long history of misogynistic tendencies that I’ve been trying to atone for in the past couple years. I used to be almost as bad as the knight. It’s not an easy thing to say, but it’s true, and it’s probably a personal factor that has gone to heighten this story’s effectiveness for me.

In a way the story’s climax is a bitter one. The knight is not cured of his curse, nor is he redeemed, but rather becomes another toy for the lady, who herself is said to be deeply unhappy. Things turn out well for the witch, though, who has gotten out of her toxic relationship and can now act only for herself again. Aging and wounded from her travels, she take up working at a shop, not saying much but being content in her work—only she’s met with one last visitor, a peddler “with a profitable knack for roaming between stories” who offers her a pair of red shoes. The ending is a bit of a head-scratcher if taken on a literal level, but since this is a fairy tale it’s easy to grasp the allegorical significance of the witch putting on the shoes and taking flight, after having suffered and yet retained a sense of purity. Unlike the mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen’s story, who must work in the afterlife to redeem herself, Yu’s witch is more akin to Thomas Hardy’s Tess in that she is a fundamentally good woman who has been done dirty. The very end sees the witch ascend to the heavens, but also out of the story.

A Step Farther Out

There’s a roughness to it, mainly in the lack of scene breaks and shifting in perspectives, that tells me it could’ve been even better had there been another rewrite. At the same time it’s telling that when logging this story for my reads-of-the-year spreadsheet I bolded the title, telling future me this is very much a story work recommending and remembering. “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” is a modern fairy tale that captures, in balanced measures, both the whimsical high fantasy and dark moralism of quite a few classic fairy tales. Yu understood the form well enough to not only emulate it successfully but to give it a little something extra. rest assured we’ll be returning to her eventually.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Shadow and the Flash” by Jack London

May 6th, 2024

(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1948.)

Who Goes There?

We’re dealing with a reprint today, and fittingly it’s from the pages of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which dealt mostly with reprints. We also have one of the “canonical” American authors with Jack London, who if you went through the American public education meatgrinder you very likely had to read at some point. London is a “literary” type who also wrote a good deal of adventure fiction and—though not as publicized—science fiction. Indeed London was one of the pioneering figures of American genre SF, to the point where he can be thought of as a precursor to the Gernsback revolution of the ’20s; it’s a wonder, then, why he was never reprinted in Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. He died young, in 1916 at forty years old, from a combination of drug abuse and severe (like eye-popping) alcoholism; but despite his early death he wrote at a mile a minute, such that while SF makes up only a fraction of his output, he still wrote enough of it (a few novels plus a couple dozen short stories) to fill multiple volumes.

“The Shadow and the Flash” was first published in The Bookman in 1903, the same year London put out his most famous work, the novella The Call of the Wild. London’s most famous stories, including The Call of the Wild, are mostly set in the Klondike, which London had actually ventured to as a gold prospector. Probably not incidentally these stories are also London’s least political, camouflaging his leftist streak; his most widely read (and said to be his best) SF novel is The Iron Heel, which is an explicitly socialist reaction to capitalist oligarchy. “The Shadow and the Flash” is not a political tract, but it does have a strong allegorical hue, working as a cautionary tale with regards to man’s relationship with the sciences. One could argue this in itself is a political statement, but London’s chief goal here is to entertain, which you have to admit he’s pretty good at.

Placing Coordinates

First published in 1903 and then reprinted in the June 1948 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which is on the Archive. It’s been collected in Moon-Face and Other Stories, The Scarlet Plague and Other Stories, The Science Fiction of Jack London, The Iron Heel & Other Stories, and honestly too many more to count. The most curious reprint might be Judith Merril’s first anthology, Shot in the Dark, which is comprised mostly of ’40s genre SF stories but which also contains a few pre-Gernsback items. It’s totally possible Merril became aware of the London story through its FFM appearance. Since London has been dead for a very long time his stuff is all in the public domain, so here’s the Project Gutenberg link.

Enhancing Image

The narrator begins by telling us about two of his friends, Lloyd Inwood and Paul Tichlorne, who are mutuals and somehow both very similar and total opposites, like yin and yang. “Both were high-strung, prone to excessive tension and endurance, and they lived at concert pitch.” The two were all but born to be rivals, a rivalry that goes back to the three dudes’ childhoods, and at one point they were even pining for the same girl, who sadly had to turn them both down on account of polygamy not being an option. I’m not kidding, she can’t choose between the men, claims to love both, but says that since polygamy is illegaly and polyamory is taboo, the trio must disperse. (Worth mentioning she uses the word “polyandry,” which is to say a woman taking on multiple male partners, whereas “polyamory” would not be coined until the 1990s. The more you know…) Point being Lloyd and Paul are two brilliant men, at least with regards to the sciences, who also happen to have a strong competitive streak and who hate each other’s guts. The narrator, being a comparatively average guy, is basically forced to watch as his oomfies get up to hijinks in the name of besting each other.

The rivalry culminates in a question Lloyd and Paul are set on answering: How does one achieve invisibility? The topic of invisibility seemed to hold a lot of water in London’s time, for reasons I can’t parse. Consider that over the course of the roughly 200-year history of science fiction as we recognize it, topics shift in and out of relevance—by that I mean areas of science (or more often pseudo-science) that writers gravitate toward. In the 1840s and ’50s hypnosis (or mesmerism as it was called then) was in vogue then, with Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne getting in on it, and indeed hypnosis would remain popular up to the dawn of the 20th century. Infamously there was an obnoxious influx of SF stories concerned with ESP in the ’30s through the ’50s, in no small part due to John W. Campbell’s obsession with it. (A point rarely brought up about “Who Goes There?” and something that wasn’t carried over to The Thing is that the alien is said to be able to mimic people’s personalities by way of ESP.) In the 1950s there was also the start of the UFO craze. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there seemed this fascination with invisibility—see such iconic stories as Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?,” Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” and of course Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” Then we have this relatively obscure Jack London story, which tackles a possible scientific basis for invisibility.

The rivalling scientists complement each other more than either could anticipate, including down to how each tries to attain invisibility. Lloyd, for his part, aims for perfect blackness—an object so black that the human eye struggles to perceive it. This wouldn’t be a Jack London story without at least a bit of racism, so we’re met with a cringe-worthy scene where Lloyd takes the narrator to a boxing match and remarks that a black man, when in the shadows of the edges of the interior, seems practically invisible. So, a formula that would create perfect blackness so as to be imperceptible, although that does leave one problem Lloyd is unable to fix: the object’s shadow. Nothing he can do about that it seems, so it’s not “perfect” invisibility. Paul, on his end, tries a formula that would make an object perfectly transparent in the sense that light goes through it, and as such it would not only be invisible but cast no shadow—like a pane of glass, only more so. The problem, then, is different, in that like glass the invisible object is subject to color flashes, like a rainbow effect, such that the invisible object would give off brief flashes of color. Thus we have the title, the shadow and the flash—the imperfections in each man’s experiment. The narrator, not being a scientist, is astounded by all this, although he fears his friends may be verging on a point of no return—that these experiments could prove disastrous.

If “The Shadow and the Flash” is about anything it’s about the impossibility of attaining perfection, even if one tries bending the laws of known science. Each man’s invention is miraculous, but also flawed, without a solution that wouldn’t spawn yet another flaw. Each has what the other lacks. This follows a long tradition in science fiction of the sciences being a catalyst for man’s folly—an anti-science slant that goes back to Frankenstein and which can be often seen in the works of Michael Crichton. In this sense London’s story is very much a cautionary story; but at the same time it must be said there’s a tangible awe with how he and his scientists describe their discoveries, a thirst for knowledge that London seemed to share with his characters to some extent. Remember that London was an autodidact, a voracious reader who read up on seemingly every notable intellectual of the 19th century, for lack of a proper education; one can safely assume a strong curiosity is necessary for such a life. Like Lloyd and Paul, who are born risk-takers (we’re told of a childhood episode where the two nearly drowned themselves in one of their contests), London was an adventurer who probably didn’t imagine himself living to a fine old age. As such there’s an immediacy and ferocity in the writing that would make it read as exaggerated to a modern reader, but it would’ve fit well in a pulp magazine.

There Be Spoilers Here

The climax of this story is a bit of an odd one. The three meet up on a tennis court, wherein Lloyd and Paul are both invisible; mind you that both men are naked, and they seem to be pretty casual about this around the presumably straight narrator. (Fabric is too complex a material to make totally invisible, so it makes sense to strip and paint yourself with the experimental formula, right?) The two men get into a fight on the court (remember that this is two almost perfectly invisible men) that results, somehow, in them beating each other to death. It’s unclear how they could’ve killed each other at basically the same time or how they would’ve been able to even handle each other. There are a few logical questions that pop up throughout this story that it’s best to not think too hard about. For example we meet at one point a hunting dog Paul has made invisible and which the narrator accidentally fumbles into, except apparently the formula has made the dog perfectly silent as well as invisible, as it doesn’t make even the slightest sound until it makes direct contact with the narrator. I say this all in good fun, of course, because the science remains just plausible enough whilst providing a fast-paced and engrossing narrative. And anyway the narrator at least learns an important lesson. This whole tragedy could’ve been prevented had the boys agreed to be in an M/F/M throuple.

A Step Farther Out

Aside from a certain scene, “The Shadow and the Flash” holds up a surprising amount given its vintage. I mentioned at the beginning that it’s perplexing how London never appeared in Amazing Stories when that magazine was focused on reprints, since Hugo Gernsback was concerned with establishing a continuity with pre-pulp pioneers in the field like H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe. Surely London’s contributions to SF are not to be overlooked! At the same time the fact that this story reads like proto-Gernsbackian and even proto-Campbellian goes to show how much American genre SF had changed between 1900 and 1950—or rather how much it didn’t change. It’s praise for the story but damning for the field as a whole.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Birthright” by April Smith

May 3rd, 2024

(Cover by Kenneth Rossi. If, August 1955.)

Who Goes There?

It’s May 3, 2024, and I’m being forced to live in interesting times. College students are protesting an ongoing genocide in a country that the federal government and American military contractors support, and the antediluvian head of state is calling for protests—not real protests, but more like when a bunch of people sit in a circle and chat like it’s a fucking book club or AA meeting. Conservatives want protesters’ skulls crushed, liberals also want protesters’ skulls crushed but are usually much more “polite” about wishing violence upon people who were born literally this century and who are committing the “crime” of being disgusted with American complicity in atrocities. And worst of all, it’s an election year. Is this 2024 or 1968? You may be thinking, “Brian, you’re being awfully political right now, and also you’re dating your review.” You’re right on both counts. In fact I dated it at the very start. Of course people might not know about this blog in five years, or even know what America is—or was.

Not that the above is strictly irrelevant either, since today’s story is also about the folly and immorality of empire, although its conclusion is much more optimistic than what I’ve been able to consider for the current real-world situation. I haven’t said anything about April Smith yet because unfortunately I can’t say anything about April Smith, although I can say a good deal about the fact that I have nothing to say about her. Smith has two stories to her name, with “Birthright” being her only solo work, and in neither case do we get any biographical information in the introductory blurb. We don’t know when she was born or when she (probably) died, where she grew up, what non-genre work she might’ve done, or even if “April Smith” is her real name. She is, like too many lady authors who were active in ’50s genre SF, a ghost of that era.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1955 issue of If, which is on the Archive. It would not be reprinted in any form for over sixty years; for better or worse Smith let it fall out of copyright, so the full story is on Project Gutenberg. It would finally be reprinted in book form in Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), editor unknown.

Enhancing Image

Cyril Kirk is an ambitious young man, top of his class, and while some dudes might want a fancy car or a high-powered gaming laptop, Kirk wants a planet that he sees as worthy of patronage. And theoretically at least he has options: the Galactic Union contains dozens of worlds, mostly for the purposes of colonization and resource mining. Unfortunately Ross, Kirk’s superior, makes him a planetary advisor on one of the most obscure and least valuable worlds in the Union: Nemar. Even someone as well-read as Kirk can’t remember this planet off the top of his head, and further research doesn’t help much. “The documents on Nemar, all the information he could dig up, confirmed Ross’s statement that the planet held nothing of commercial value.” So he’s been assigned a planet that, at least as far as the Union is concerned, is basically worthless. It won’t be a short assignment either: five mandatory years, plus five optional, although Kirk suspects he won’t be using those extra years. He won’t be the only Terran on Nemar, but that won’t help him much either, since we soon learn the people he’ll be working with are as enthusiastic about making the natives useful as he is.

Once we land on Nemar, a few things become clear: the natives have no interest in contributing to the Union, and perhaps more importantly, they seem like they have no need to. I have to stop for a second here to say that “Birthright” is overtly a narrative about colonialism, about a member of the empire trying (and spoilers, failing) to “enlighten” the indigenous population. Overall it’s a pretty progressive-minded story, actually far more left-leaning for the ’50s than I had expected, but it does also play into Orientalist fantasies, what with the natives of Nemar being perpetually semi-nude (although they consider it to be normal attire), conventionally attractive yet exotic, and they’re described several times as “naive” and “childlike.” Nemar is clearly supposed to be like a paradise, like vacationing on one of the Hawai’ian island. Incidentally it’s noted at the beginning that the natives are basically homo sapiens, just with a unique skin complexion, and that Nemar itself is very similar to the tropics on Earth. If you were to adapt “Birthright” for film or TV (and you could do that without the headache of securing rights, since it’s public domain), you would probably shoot in Hawai’i, or maybe Samoa if you’re feeling a little more adventurous. My biggest gripe with the story, aside from its lack of a solid ending (will get to that), is that while it’s a cutting criticism of colonial arrogance, this criticism is also undermined by now-outdated racial politics.

While reading I was reminded most of Joseph Conrad, and also the movie Fitzcarraldo. Both Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo are movies about arrogant white men in exotic locales, with the explicit and implicit comments on colonialism; and there’s also the fact that both are infamous “I will kill everyone on this set and then myself for the bit” movies. “Birthright” is nowhere near as daunting; if anything it comes close to being a fish-out-of-water comedy. Kirk has a native woman, Nanae, who looks after the house he’s been given, and he practically trips over his own cock trying not to ask for this woman’s hand in marriage upon first seeing her. He cannot come to terms with the fact that he is super-horny over Nanae and it embarrasses him, not least because fellow Terrans in the village (including Jeannette, an actual Earth woman) see his plight for what it is immediately. Indeed everyone seems to see right through Kirk except for Nanae, although it’s possible she knows and is too polite to say anything. The lax attitude of the other Terrans, who at this point are more expats than workers of the Union, also troubles Our Hero™, as if something in the air has changed them, made them forget their purpose here. “Somehow, the planet had infected them.” There must be some secret “weapon” the natives use to pacify the PAs, and Kirk’s gonna find out what it is.

Not to get nostalgic over an era I was not even close to being alive for, but I admire that at this time in SF history you could have stories with meaty ideas that were still only short stories or novellas. Nowadays it seems like if you wanna draw any attention in the field you have to write, bare minimum, a long novella (say close to 40,000 words) that would be too lengthy for magazine publication but just the right length for an overpriced Tor chapbook. “Birthright” just barely meets the SFWA criterion for novella length and, truth be told, it could’ve been a few thousand words longer; not saying this as a negative criticism. Smith’s style is breezy and on the side of minimalist. The story can be thought of less as a “story” and more like a series of Socratic dialogues, although these dialogues individually tend to be brief and there was never a point where I wondered if or when Smith would “get on with it.” This is not an action narrative; it’s about a man’s slow but sure transformation from an agent of the empire to someone who’s wondering if his bootlicking has been worth the effort—or even if it’s been well-intentioned. Nemar is basically a socialist utopia in the mode of what Ursula K. Le Guin might’ve envisioned (which has its own problems, but we’re not getting into that today), a society where there’s no fixed hierarchy, where parents respect their children, where money seems to be a non-issue, and where’s almost no industry to speak of.

There Be Spoilers Here

This leads to Kirk figuring out the planet’s “secret,” which is really that there is no secret. The natives have cultivated a society that’s founded on compassion, as opposed to most Union societies (and by extension our society) which are founded on protection of property. When Kirk tries to convince the village council on voting in favor of mining operations on the planet, the council votes no. The council’s rationale for this denial of industry is pretty hard to argue with, for both Kirk and the reader. An unnamed member of the council goes on by far the longest monologue in the story, and I may as well quote “all” of it here. I say “all” because the paragraph the monologue is a part of is even longer, if you can believe it:

“As you said, the mining is very hard, disagreeable work. We feel that when you begin to do disagreeable things for an end that is not valuable in itself, you are beginning to tread a dangerous path. There is no telling where it will end. One such situation leads to another. We might end up cooped up in a room all day, shut away from the sun and air, turning bolts on an assembly line to make machines, as we have heard often happens on Terra. […] Being surrounded by technical conveniences isn’t worth that. […] On Terra and on most of the other planets we have had word of, people seem to spend their time making all kinds of things that have no value in themselves, because they can be sold or traded. Other people spend their time trying to persuade people to buy these useless things. Still other people spend all day making records of how many of these things have been sold. No! This path is not for us. […] We don’t know how it came about that all these people spend their time at these unpleasant, useless things. They can’t have wanted it that way. No human being could want to spend his time doing silly, pointless things. How could you believe in yourself? How could you walk proudly? How could you explain it to your children? We must be careful not to make the mistake of taking the first step in that direction.”

So capitalism does not flourish on the planet, at least for now. Kirk is, at least professionally speaking, a failure; but at the same time he comes to realize he may have won on a personal and moral level—that by “giving in” to the ways of these people he seems on his way to redeeming himself. He accepts that he has become like a child again. He even ponders, at the very end, the possibility of earning Nanae’s affections and returning to Earth with her. This ending sentiment is fine, but also the story doesn’t so much “end” as it comes to a stop, which bothered me initially.

A Step Farther Out

I’m sort of dismayed it took seven decades for “Birthright” to appear in book form; surely this has nothing to do with the sexism of anthology editors in the ’50s until at least the ’80s. There are some pretty rotten stories from this era that have been reprinted multiple times, but not a genuinely interesting yarn like this one. It’s flawed in a couple ways, and I wish April Smith had continued trying her hand at genre writing (this was her second story and it would be her last, at least under the April Smith name), but it shows a level of ambition not too often found in ’50s genre writing. I get pretty sentimental about the ’50s in the context of genre SF because it really was like the Klondike gold rush for pulp writers, each author looking to make some kind of living off writing what was often perceived as childish at the time, looking to get lucky and even publish a bestseller. Most of the attempts would be failures, of course, but there are so many hidden gems from this period that I’m convinced that despite being so often mined for anthologies, we have not even come close to drying this particular well.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: May 2024

May 1st, 2024
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Fantastic, July 1964.)

Not much to say with regards to updates here, other than I’m looking into a tutoring gig and I seem to be starting a polycule, the latter of which I’ve heard is kinda like starting a rock band. If anyone wants to join, please let me know. There are no gimmicks for this month’s review forecast, except that we have a complete novel on our hands for the first time in what feels like forever, and we’ve got a few familiar faces returning to the site. I may have also intentionally picked Lucius Shepard and Aliette de Bodard stories with similar titles. One thing I’ve been thinking about that I’ve decided to act on is reviewing more reprints of classic stories; one every couple months seems like a good deal. The reason for this is at least twofold: I have a soft spot for the classics, but I also wanna cover authors from the pre-pulp years who contributed to genre fiction. This month I’ll be reviewing an SF story by Jack London, who is not known primarily for his SF but who indeed wrote a lot of it. Once again Jack Vance will be providing the novel, which is unsurprising since quite a few of his novels first appeared in magazines, either as serials or all in one piece like this month’s novel.

Don’t wanna keep you long; just letting you know we have another month packed with fiction that looks to be at least interesting, although it’s mostly SF with a couple fantasy stories thrown in.

For the novellas:
1. “Birthright” by April Smith. From the August 1955 issue of If. Smith sadly is one of many women who wrote SF in the pre-New Wave days whom we know basically nothing about. We don’t know when she was born or when she died. She’s a ghost. She has one solo story, “Birthright,” to her credit, plus one collaboration. ISFDB classifies this story as a novelette, but running the Project Gutenberg text through a word processor shows it’s just over 17,500 words.
2. “Polyphemus” by Michael Shea. From the August 1981 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Shea had a varied career, lasting from the ’70s until his death in 2014. His work ran the gamut from SF to high fantasy to the Cthulhu Mythos. He won the World Fantasy Award multiple times for his fantasy and horror. His most famous story, “The Autopsy,” is an SF-horror hybrid, and “Polyphemus” looks to be a similar blend of the two genres.
For the short stories:
1. “The Shadow and the Flash” by Jack London. From the June 1948 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. First published in 1903. London was one of the most popular and prolific authors of the early 20th century, despite dying young. He’s best known for his adventure stories set in the Klondike, such as The Call of the Wild and White Fang, but he also wrote a surprising amount of science fiction.
2. “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” by E. Lily Yu. From the September-October 2016 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Yu burst onto the scene with her story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” which nabbed her several award nominations. She won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer the same year she graduated from Princeton, which is no small feat.
3. “The Jaguar Hunter” by Lucius Shepard. From the May 1985 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Speaking of late bloomers, Shepard didn’t start writing fiction as an adult until he was deep in his thirties, but he quickly emerged as one of the defining SFF writers of the ’80s. If you’ve read enough Shepard then you know he has a “type,” and this story looks to be typical Shepard.
4. “Descending” by Thomas M. Disch. From the July 1964 issue of Fantastic. Feels like it’s been a long time since I covered Disch, with his novel Camp Concentration. Disch was one of the daring young writers to kick off the New Wave in the ’60s, although despite being a regular at Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds he actually first appeared in Fantastic, under Cele Goldsmith-Lalli’s editorship.
5. “The Defenders” by Philip K. Dick. From the January 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been ten months since I last talked about Dick on here, which in my book is too long a wait. The thing about Dick is that he’s become frankly over-discussed in “serious” SF discussions, or at least his most famous novels. Thankfully this is not the case with many of his short stories, such as this one.
6. “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard. From the July 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Of Vietnamese heritage, living in France, and writing predominantly in English, de Bodard has a curious cultural background, so it makes sense she would concoct one of the most curious future histories in modern SF. Spacefaring humanity here is decidedly non-white and non-American.
For the complete novel:
1. Planet of the Damned by Jack Vance. From the December 1952 issue of Space Stories. The early ’50s were a formative period for Vance, who was showing himself to be one of the most imaginative talents at the time—albeit one whose efforts were mostly relegated to second-rate magazines. I’ve previously covered Big Planet, which was a breakthrough title for Vance, and now we’re on Vance’s follow-up novel, published just a few months later. Planet of the Damned has a rather convoluted publication history: as with Big Planet, the magazine version and not the first book version served as the basis for future “definitive” reprints. It’s also been printed as Slaves of the Klau and Gold and Iron.
Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “The Growth of the House of Usher” by Brian Stableford

April 27th, 2024

(Cover by Pete Lyon. Interzone, Summer 1988.)

Who Goes There

Brian Stableford started out as a fan, and even made his professional debut while still a teenager back in the ’60s. His early start implied a fierce intellect, which he would then go on to vindicate by contributing to the field in several disparate ways—all of them rather intriguing. He was an author, sure, but he was also a prolific translator, possibly being the person most responsible for bringing modern French SF to an English readership; and on top of that he was an editor and genuine studier of the field, even contributing to the SF Encyclopedia. If you’re like me and you like to dig through genre history then you’ve very likely already gotten a taste of Stableford’s writing, if not necessarily his fiction. It makes sense, then, that today’s story is all about history—family history as well as genre history. It’s tempting to call “The Growth of the House of Usher” an Edgar Allan Poe pastiche, but that isn’t quite right. Does it live up to its famous namesake? Hmmm. Almost. Stableford made a solid go at it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Summer 1988 issue of Interzone, which for some reason is not on the Internet Archive. Most of Interzone‘s back issues up to like 2010 are on there, but not this one. It is on Luminist, but… whether I provide a link to Luminist depends on what mood I’m in. Like what even is it? Some weird new age thing? Anyway, this story was then reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Interzone: The 4th Anthology (ed. John Clute, Simon Ounsley, and David Pringle), and the Stableford collection Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution.

Enhancing Image

It’s impossible to talk about this story without also talking about Poe’s, which I’ve read several times over the years and which I just (as I’m writing this) finished rereading it. So consider this a review and a half. Needless to say I’ll be spoiling both, although the Poe story is so famous that unless you live under a rock you already know the broad strokes of that one. I’ll be spoiling the Poe story early and with extreme prejudice.

Immediately there are some parallels. The unnamed (in both cases) narrator travels (by motorboat in the Stableford, by horse in the Poe) to the secluded manor of his friend whom he has not spoken with in years, Rowland Usher. Rowland is the last of the Ushers, a sickly man who never married or had offspring, and who evidently is grieving over the death of his sister. In the Poe, the sister (Madeline) died very recently, such that Roderick and the narrator are able to place her still-warm body in the family vault. (Turns out she’s not as dead as she appeared.) Unlike her Poe counterpart, though, Rowland’s sister (Magdalene) is super-dead; in fact she died several years prior to the story’s beginning, as a teenager. Not everything lines up, much to the narrator’s relief. “I think I might have been alarmed if Rowland had told me that his sister were still alive, and had I seen her flitting ethereally through the apartment just then. This would have been one parallel too many for my tired mind to bear.” But still, Rowland is dying, and has called on his old college friend to hear his last will and testament—and to understand the very odd experiment that is the Usher house.

“The Growth of the House of Usher” is very much a recursive story, probably even more so than the usual, in that not only does it openly take after a classic work, and not only does it expect the reader to already be familiar with the story it’s taking after, but the characters within the story are also aware that they’re inside a recursive tale. Rowland Usher had intentionally modeled the house after the Poe story, although interestingly more as a response to it than out of sheer respect. The new Usher house is also, in a weird way, alive. Rowland’s been a devotee of biology for years; it runs in the family. He’s been using this knowledge to run experiments, with his own house as what he hopes will be his finest achievement. This fixation on biology might come from the fact that the Ushers have been afflicted with a hereditary illness akin to cancer that’s now whittled their numbers down to one man. The women in the Usher family took this illness worse than the men, dying in the teens like Rowland’s sister did. In the Poe story, the physical defects in Roderick and his sister are implied to come from acute incest—the Usher family tree being less like a tree and more like a long blade of grass. Similarly Rowland and his sister were also in an incestuous relationship, although this is made explicit rather than implicit, with the narrator admitting that by the 22nd century the taboo against sibling incest had become more or less a non-issue.

Let’s talk about incest some more, since it figures so heavily into the basic “Usher” narrative, both literally and symbolically. Something to keep in mind about when Poe lived, in the first half of the 19th century, consensual incest was by no means uncommon—so long as it was between cousins. It was a regular practice in the US and UK, among the aristocracy and even in lower-income households. Poe himself was betrothed to his cousin Virginia, and while there’s been debate for decades as to whether the couple ever “consummated” or if it was more platonic, a) to think the couple’s relationship was not even romantic would be wishful thinking on the part of puritans, and b) the fact is that from we do know, Poe very much loved Virginia, and was stricken when she died—possible driven to despair. And yet one has to admit that “The Fall of the House of Usher,” arguably Poe’s greatest story and undoubtedly his biggest contribution to the Gothic tradition, is strangely transfixed on the prospect of a family being undone by long-term incest—even if said incest is only alluded to. Poe and Virginia had been married for a few years, with Poe only pushing thirty when he wrote “Usher,” and yet despite Virginia’s tuberculosis diagnosis still being a few years off it’s a story all about sickness. Of course, if you’ve read enough of Poe’s fiction then you start to figure he was always kinda Like That™, being obsessed with the sickly and morbid.

Poe’s influence on Stableford’s story is so strong that even the narrator talks in a way that mimic’s a typical Poe narrator, although it’s unclear if this pseudo-Victorian manner is just a quirk the narrator and Rowland have or if it had somehow become in vogue for educated Americans in the 22nd century, since there are basically no other human characters to speak of—at least none currently living. It’s also possible that reading a ton of Poe, Byron, and other Romantic-era writers during his stay at the Usher house had an influence on the narrator’s speech, since by his own admission he has started to even dream of Poe-esque terrors. “I—a scientist of the twenty-second century—was infected by the morbidity of the Gothic Imagination!” To make matters worse, the narrator catches a glimpse one night of a young and for some reason naked girl, “fourteen or fifteen,” coming out of Rowland’s bed chamber, but doesn’t get the chance to intercept her before she makes off into the night. In fairness to the narrator, he’s not even sure if this is really happening at first, and anyway it’s certainly hard to explain. Could this be Rowland’s dead sister? But Magdalene died years ago; even if she were still alive somehow she would be visibly older than this. It’s also this aspect of the story where I think Stableford goes too far, or rather he goes far without a constructive reason behind the transgression that I can discern. I had heard this story contains “creepy sex stuff” and I’m pretty sure the “stuff” with the teen girl is what’s being referred to here.

Since “The Growth of the House of Usher” is all about biology and genetics, it must also—by extension if nothing else—be about sex. This is a dangerous game for writers, especially SF writers. Prior to the ’50s there was almost no discussion or even mentioning of sex in genre SF (I say “the ’50s” and not “the ’60s” because, as a devotee of ’50s SF, I can tell you that authors at that time were often incredibly horny, only they didn’t show it in as crass a language as the New Wave folks), and so in the years following the laxing of censorship some authors took it upon themselves to go maybe too far in the other direction. The ’70s were an especially bad time for this sort of thing (read twenty post-New Wave SF stories at random and take a shot every time there’s a dubious relationship between a grown-ass adult and a teenager), marring what in some cases would otherwise be great fiction. I find it interesting that Stableford would turn the subtext of Poe’s “Usher” into text while also flipping the house of Usher itself on its head by turning a deeply unnatural work of architecture (indeed a house that’s implied to have its own genius loci) into a house that is made up of thousands of living organisms—a house that quite literally lives and breathes. At the same time the subplot with Rowland’s sister a) doesn’t quite mesh with the ambitious genetic engineering of the house, and b) almost smacks of wish-fulfillment rather than contributes to the psychology of the narrative. It enters a level of creepy that Stableford probably hadn’t intended.

There Be Spoilers Here

Being faced with the immanent death of himself and his bloodline, Rowland has put his research into building something that won’t sink into the swamp like Roderick’s mansion—indeed a living construct which will, with time, grow to even more extravagant heights. The house “was greater than ten thousand elephants, and that if it had been a single organism then it would have been the vastest that had ever existed on Earth.” It’s a wonder of the world, a marriage between genetics and engineering that, so we’re told at the very end, has only grown since Rowland’s death. And Rowland does die, unfortunately, on the night he tells the narrator all about his family history, his relationship with his late sister, the ways in which their father treated them as “guinea-pigs,” and what he hopes for the future—a future he knows he won’t be a part of. The narrator tries to take care of his friend’s affairs after his death; it’s not like Rowland had a next of kin to do this. Oh, and then there are the “mayflies,” which from what I understand are insectoid beings who appear human, indeed have DNA shared with Rowland’s late sister and thus resemble her. I don’t like to think about that, because it’s very weird, and not in a good way. I wish Stableford was still alive so I could ask him what he could’ve possibly meant by this. Like what was bro cooking? Again the weird stuff mars what is otherwise a good ending.

A Step Farther Out

I liked it for the most part, although part of that might be my love of Poe and genre history—loves which Stableford happens to share. I probably should’ve mentioned at the beginning that “The Growth of the House of Usher” spawned from a speculative non-fiction book Stableford wrote with David Langford, The Third Millennium: A History of the World AD 2000-3000, which would serve as the basis for a future history called the Biotech Revolution. “The Growth of the House of Usher” was the first story written for this future history, although what stories exactly are part of this future history is unclear since there’s not a complete overlap between stories included in Biotech Revolution collections and what ISFDB counts as part of the series. It’s a bit complicated, but it’s also intriguing.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Original Sin” by Vernor Vinge

April 24th, 2024

(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Analog, December 1972.)

Who Goes There?

Vernor Vinge died last month, in what turned out to be a battle with Parkinson’s; and it was one of the most crushing losses for the field in a long time, because Vinge was one of the most creative mind of his generation. Despite not being a very prolific writer, and despite his work being all over the place in terms of quality, Vinge at his best was one of those rare talents, like Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison at their best, who genuinely pushed the field in new directions and made readers and fellow writers see new horizons. His novella “True Names” is a seminal work of cyberpunk that came out just before the word “cyberpunk” would be coined, and modern readers will find it holds up to an eerie degree today. His duology The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime might’ve been the first prolonged attempts at speculating on human life right before and after the technological singularity—a term Vinge did not invent, although he did popularize it. His loosely linked novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky both won him Hugos, and more importantly they revolutionized the space opera during what was already a renaissance for the subgenre. Vinge is unwittingly responsible for a generation of Elon Musk fanboys—but let’s not hold that against him.

With the notable exception of “True Names,” Vinge is not known for his short fiction, although that didn’t stop him from winning the Hugo for Best Novella twice. “Original Sin” is pretty obscure, even as far as Vinge’s short fiction goes; so far I’ve seen a total of one solitary person talk about it, albeit positively. It’s early Vinge, and while it was published during Ben Bova’s tenure at Analog it might be a story John W. Campbell had bought right before his death; it reads like a classic Campbellian narrative—with a little twist. It’s flawed, in the way Vinge’s earlier writing tends to be flawed, but while it starts out rough it does have some points of interest.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1972 issue of Analog, which is not on the Internet Archive but which can be found on Luminist. I happen to have a physical copy of this issue. “Original Sin” was then reprinted in the Vinge collections Threats… and Other Promises and The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. Would be nice if we got an updated version of the latter since it doesn’t include the several short stories and novellas Vinge put out afterward.

Enhancing Image

Humanity has not only reached beyond our solar system but encountered intelligent life in the process. It’s been about two centuries since humanity made contact with the Shimans, a sentient bipedal race that’s like a cross between a kangaroo and a shark. The Shimans are a vicious bunch, but also fiercely intelligent—such that within two centuries they went from being pre-agrarian barbarians to having tech and societal structure on par with late-20th century America. Really the only thing keeping the Shimans from progressing even faster is a very short lifespan. “The creatures were really desperate: no Shiman had ever lived longer than twenty-five Earth months.” Enter Professor Kekkonen, a very old (although he doesn’t look it) biologist and both friend and employee of Samuelson Enterprises. Evidently humans have invented a rejuvenating technology that gives people something close to immortality (assuming they don’t get killed), and the Shimans want that same tech. Problem is, “the Empire” (Earth has apparently become united—and imperialistic) doesn’t want Shimans to have said tech; so Kekkonen has been conducting his work on Shiman biology very much illegally, with the help of a bribed “Earthpol” agent. Shit hits the fan, though, when Earthpol gets a whiff of Kekkonen’s scent, with a massive pyramid-like ship hovering over the planet.

Vinge structured the story such that mostly we follow Kekkonen’s first-person narration, which itself I think is a mistake since we can infer right away that the professor gets out of this ordeal alive, and this is supposed to be basically an action narrative. I’m also not big on the voice Vinge gives Kekkonen: it’s too snarky for my taste. This first-person narration is broken up a few times with a third-person perspective that’s all in italics and which is written in a very different style, evoking an old-timey fable or, more accurately, the Bible. The problem here is that Vinge is not a poet; his style at its best can be considered decidedly utilitarian. With the major exception of another early story, “Long Shot,” which is closer to a narrative prose poem than a short story (I think it’s fairly effective as that), Vinge doesn’t capture the imagination with his language so much as his straightforward way of describing things which are in and of themselves mind-bending. We remember the Bobbles, the Tines, the virtual world in “True Names,” and so on, but because of the things themselves and not because of Vinge’s language. The Bible-esque passages regarding the life-death cycle of the Shimans was an earnest attempt, but it doesn’t work for me and this story would’ve been a few pages shorter if I had gotten my grubby hands on it.

I’ve mostly gotten the negatives out of the way, so let me juxtapose that with something I think “Original Sin” does really well, which is the aliens. Despite having two legs, aping human technology, and even being able to replicate human speech (one wonders how they do that given their rows of shark teeth), the Shimans are decidedly not human. The third and final main character, after Kekkonen and Tsumo (the bribed Earthcop), is Sirbat, a Shiman escort is comes out of this story the most interesting of the three in no small part because of his aloof nature. He speaks perfect English and is perfectly willing to cooperate with the humans, considering what’s in for his race, but one also gets the impression he’s constantly holding back a part of himself—probably an urge to eat his own comrades. One reason Earth is very worried at the prospect of Shimans gaining nigh-immortality is that the Shimans are vicious, yes, but they’re also voracious eaters; indeed cannibalism is part of their very biology, since baby Shimans escape the “womb” by devouring their own parent. I say “parent” and not “mother” because the Shimans are single-sex, reproduce asexually, and they seem to all be male, although Vinge is unclear if the Shimans actually identify as male or if male pronouns are simply what the humans use for the sake of convenience. So let’s say the Shimans are males that happen to give birth.

“Original Sin” is basically a problem story, or rather a question story: Is it ethically sound to give an alien civilization technology that could make said aliens an existential threat to other intelligent life in the universe? Is it right for humanity to keep a powerful technology to itself for fear that there may be competition—possibly even a rival for the position of supreme intelligent race? Vinge has always had a keen moral sense, or at least a strong moral curiosity, which you have to admit makes his endorsing of anarcho-capitalism fucking bewildering. (In fairness he seemed to think other forms of anarchism are valid, but felt that anarcho-capitalism, for some reason, was the “correct” option. I’m sorry, I’m getting distracted.) So Kekkonen is in a tough spot: he was hired by a longtime friend to do a job that may or may not result in humanity’s eventual destruction, and at the same time the cop that Samuelson had bribed in the first place is practically begging him to not go through with the experiment. The Shimans of course wanna live a hundred years instead of just two, and wouldn’t Kekkonen feel like an asshole for denying a whole race a longer lifespan? It’s a curious dilemma that acts as good brain food—even if it becomes clear by the end which side Vinge supports.

There Be Spoilers Here

Using this section to talk about Tsumo, who’s a bit of a mixed bag as a character. Vinge ain’t half bad at writing women usually, but he’s on shaky ground with this one. Her backstory is interesting: she had a husband who served as a Christian missionary on Shima, and nobody knows what happened to him—possibly killed and eaten by his own followers. (Should probably also mention Christianity has taken off among the Shimans, despite and possibly because of their ravenous nature.) So Tusmo has a certain vendetta against the Shimans, although she denies this has anything to do with not wanting the little bastards to have extremely long lifespans. At one point towards the end she even seduces Kekkonen and sleeps with him in an effort to stop him from finishing the experiment. Not sure if this was necessary on Vinge’s part. Anyway, it doesn’t work, because Kekkonen reveals that Samuelson wants the Shimans to become competitors with humanity. This all feels like almost an inversion of the Adam-and-Eve myth, hence the title. Adam and Eve give up their immortality for the sake of knowledge, whereas the Shimans are already knowledge-hungry (on top of just being hungry in general) but seek virtual immortality so as to remove the cap for that knowledge-seeking. The “original sin” of the title also refers to the Shimans’ biologically mandated genocide and patricide—the fact that they must eat their own parents and then most of each other.

A Step Farther Out

Do I recommend this story? Hmmm, not unless you’re already familiar with Vinge’s writing and you’re curious about his early work. I would not recommend it as one’s first Vinge story because it’s more apparently flawed than his more mature work, and unlike his first story, “Apartness” (review here), it’s more confused. I actually considered giving up and picking a different Vinge story early on, because this story really does not start on the right foot; but I’m glad I kept with it, because it did get better as it progressed. I could’ve picked a worse story to review in paying tribute to someone I think of as one of the true masters of the field.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Two Suns Setting” by Karl Edward Wagner

April 20th, 2024

(Cover by Steve Hickman. Fantastic, May 1976.)

Who Goes There?

Karl Edward Wagner is one of those recent discoveries for me who sadly I’ve not been able to read a lot more of as of yet, because his works are not exactly easy to find. Wagner is (I’ve been told) arguably the best of the generation of writers to hop on the sword-and-sorcery revival of the late ’60s and early ’70s. He debuted in 1970 with the novel Darkness Weaves with Many Shades…, which was also the first to star his nigh-immortal anti-hero Kane, seemingly based on the Cain of the Bible. In an interview for the fanzine Dagon, Wagner had this to say on his biggest contribution to heroic fantasy:

The idea of Kane came from all the villains that I saw as heroes, derived from reading books, comics and watching movies: the bad gunfighter who would get shot down, who was really faster than the good guy. Good always had to win so I thought I’d write about a villain who always wins. Villains always had to be either like Fu Manchu, or intensely intelligent super scientific geniuses, but they couldn’t really break somebody in half, or else they were big hulking creatures like Rondo Hatton. So I thought what happens if you got the super intelligent villain who could break somebody in half if he wanted to? That’s how Kane came about. He was a villain who was going to win at the end and be smart enough to control the situation when things got bad. If he had to mow down sixty other people he could handle that, that is if he didn’t summon up something supernatural in the process. I thought let’s do something totally all out, and that’s Kane.

“Two Suns Setting” is one of the more notable Kane stories, and even won Wagner his second British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story; the first was for his Lovecraftian horror story (and his most famous story overall) “Sticks.” This also marked Wagner’s first and only appearance in Fantastic, which is weird because you’d think Wagner and Fantastic in the ’70s, when it had become the most high-profile outlet for heroic fantasy, would make a perfect pair. Wagner mostly stuck to fanzines and semi-pros for his stories, which might explain why he’s not as widely read as he should be: few people would’ve been able to read his stuff at the time, but the few who did thought it A+ material. (The fact that he also died young, from severe alcoholism, no doubt helped doom him to obscurity.) He’s probably known more nowadays for his horror stories, which are also highly regarded and which have been reprinted more often than his Kane stories.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1976 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 3 (ed. Lin Carter) and the Wagner collections Night Winds and Midnight Sun: The Complete Stories of Kane.

Enhancing Image

Normally I don’t talk about the quality of a story’s title, but I really like how this one both sets the tone and expectations for the reader. We can infer that the second sun in the title is a metaphorical one—perhaps a person’s life. We immediately get the sense that there will likely be a death in the narrative, but unlike most deaths in heroic fantasy tales which happen to side characters and mooks, this one will be more bitter, more funereal. Since Kane is a recurring protagonist who has something close to immortality we can guess ahead of time that Our Anti-Hero™ will make it out fine—whoever happens to be with him, not so sure. Anyway, about that special power. Obviously there’s a wish-fulfillment element with Kane aging extremely slowly, to the point of living for centuries whilst barely showing any change, but he can be killed. Kane committed some horrible crime in the past, possibly the killing of his brother although this is not told explicitly, that cursed him with a mark, so that passersby would know him by appearance. Even at this early stage in man’s history (the time of Genesis, when it seemed giants and other mythical beings roamed the earth), he has become infamous. At the beginning of the story he had just left Carsultyal, the first great human city, partly because of said infamy and partly out of boredom.

The spirit of discovery, of renaissance that had drawn him to Carsultyal in its earliest years was burned out now, so that boredom, his nemesis, had overtaken Kane once more. To be sure, he had been restless, his thoughts drawn more and more to the world beyond Carsultyal—lands yet to know the presence of man. But that he returned to his pathless wandering without much forethought could be judged in that Kane had left the city with little more than a few supplies, a double handful of gold coins, a fast horse, and a sword of tempered Carsultyal steel.

So Kane traverses the desert, without a clear destination in mind, aside from the immediate need to find food and water; his supplies are running low. Thankfully he comes across a fellow traveler who has set up camp—a giant named Dwasslir. Eighteen feet tall, the giant is cooking an entire mountain goat for himself. “Kane had seen, had spoken with giants in the course of his wanderings, although in recent decades they were seldom encountered.” Indeed, so Dwassllir admits, his race is surely but slowly dwindling—not for any particular reason it seems but, so Dwassllir suspects, the giants, being a race much older than man, have become collectively weary. Humans, still very young, have already built cities and encroached on nature’s domain, bringing civilization into the world. The giants don’t have cities, or much in the way of civilization, but as Dwassllir argues they are accustomed to living off the fat o’ the land; they don’t need civilization. Humans, being small and rather flimsy compared to their much bigger cousins, use civilization as a “crutch,” as the friendly giant says. Kane, who believes wholly in the glory of man despite being cursed, has found a philosophical opponent in the giant.

Even a giant who lives outside man’s domain and who presumably doesn’t have fast internet knows who Kane is simply by looking at him, which proves to be a bit of a problem for the latter. The two strike up something of a friendship, or at least friendly companionship as one would want while traveling, but Kane a) knows that if he pisses the giant off that the big guy could crush his skull with his bare hands like a musclebound bitch could crush a watermelon with her thighs, and b) is intrigued by a certain treasure Dwassllir mentions that he is in search of: the crown of King Brotemllain, an ancient giant ruler. “Although our wars and our kings are all past now, I believe that resurrection of this legendary symbol might unlock some of the old energy and vitality of my people,” says Dwassllir. He has long been in search of the king’s tomb, and thinks he is finally on the verge of holding this no-doubt valuable treasure in his hands—assuming Brotemllain’s tomb has not already been stripped clean by raiders. But then a royal giant’s burial place would have its own unique traps, different from what one would find in tomb built for humans.

The first half or so of the story has no action to speak of, and yet if I had to pick which is my favorite I would say it’s this one. I’m biased, and not given to action scenes much, but it helps also that Wagner is a deeply moody writer, showing a mastery of atmosphere that I had only been able to see in his horror writing prior to this, my first Kane story. I mean this as a compliment when I say “Two Suns Setting” could work as a stage production, since there are only two locations (the desert and later the tomb), two human actors (surely a very tall and muscly actor could convey Dwassllir’s enormity compared to Kane), and while there is some action that we’ll get to in a minute, this is primarily a character- and dialogue-driven narrative. It’s a kind of Socratic dialogue in which the philosophical problem of what constitutes achievement for a civilization is raised, with Kane believing the giants, having very little to show for their troubles in human terms, are a race that will be forgotten once they’ve died out, while Dwassllir thinks his people were once glorious and indeed still have the capacity for glory, despite the humans overtaking them. As if to prove this, Dwassllir will take Brotemllain’s crown, with Kane bearing witness to this moment of glory. It’s possible the giant will not even try selling the crown, but would rather keep it as a memento.

There Be Spoilers Here

Having found the tomb, the companions come pretty close to getting the crown, only for some of the architecture to give way (the tomb is old enough apparently that the stonework has become infirm), with the human and giant becoming separated. Interesting little moment leading up to this is that Kane contemplates murdering Dwassllir and taking the crown for himself, although this thought seems to vanish as suddenly as it had entered his mind. This is a startling passage, and it would be considered an out-of-character moment if not for the reader’s foreknowledge that Kane is capable of committing such a horrific deed and for such a petty reason as this. He’s a bit more of an anti-hero than Conan, who happily partakes in criminal activities but who usually tries to not take the life of innocents, whereas Kane, whether out of pragmatism or a bad mood, could stab an ally of his in the back. Right after this we’re confronted with the “monsters” of the story, as the rockslide has made a gaping hole or “aperture” to the world below. It seems the tomb was built on top of a vast underworld, where creatures live without any sunlight and having for some reason grown to enormous sizes—perhaps befitting a tomb of the giants. (By the way, people meme up Blighttown a lot, but Tomb of the Giants is a contender for the worst area in Dark Souls.) We have rats “the size of jackals,” along with something much more threatening in the form of a massive (and mostly blind) saber-toothed cat.

Kane, at first facing the big kitty alone, would surely have been toast if not for the cat having very poor eyesight, made worse by being unaccustomed to sunlight. Dwassllir comes in for the rescue, and it’s here that we get our obligatory climactic battle, man against beast, giant against giant. The fight itself is particularly badass, but more importantly for me, it clearly means something to one of the combatants. Dwassllir is literally fighting for his life, and so he can get his hands on the crown, but symbolically he’s also fighting this saber-tooth to prove a point to Kane—that the giants, in their prime, fought beasts like these and came out victorious. Even as he’s taking some pretty serious damage, by the end of it being mortally wounded, the giant still comes out seeming like a noble figure, as if he were the deserving successor to the throne on which Brotemllain’s skeleton sits. After crushing the cat’s ribcage and turning its head all the way around in what almost seems like a wrestling maneuver, Dwassllir goes to take what’s his. It’s unclear if this is due to the fact that Dwassllir is clearly dying or if he really was moved by the fight, but while Kane is perfectly capable of taking the crown for himself, he decides to hand it to the giant; he has earned it. It’s a bittersweet ending, made even more so by Kane wondering at the very end of Dwassllir, being already of a dwindling species, is maybe the last remnant of the “age of heroes.” Maybe this marks the end of an era.

A Step Farther Out

It’s almost deceptive in its simplicity. I think what I really liked about “Two Suns Setting,” aside from the beauty of Wagner’s language (especially in the first half of the story), is that it functions perfectly as a short story. It does what Edgar Allan Poe thought a good short story should do, which is provide the reader with a singular experience that’s transformative and yet which can be easily read in one sitting. Despite only taking about an hour or two to read, we come out of the experience feeling like something in the air or in ourselves has changed somehow. It’s essentially a two-act (the first in the desert, the second in the tomb) play starring two guys who not so much act as individuals as represent different states of existential dread. The action is engrossing (a rarity for me, mind you) because Wagner has set up the emotional and thematic stakes in advance, so that we understand the meaning behind the climactic fight beyond the mere physicality of it. And of course anything that gives me the itch to play Dark Souls again must be doing something right.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Palely Loitering” by Christopher Priest

April 17th, 2024

(Cover by Ron Walotsky. F&SF, January 1979.)

Who Goes There?

Christopher Priest had a pretty long and dramatic career, and it pains me that (as far as I can remember) this is the first time I’ve read any of his fiction. I tried reading his novel Inverted World a couple months ago but had a false start with it; the timing wasn’t quite right. Inverted World is one of the cult classics of ’70s SF, even getting an NYRB paperback edition. (NYRB is like the Criterion Collection for book snobs, sorry but it’s true.) His novel The Prestige would be adapted for film by Christopher Nolan, which on the one hand must’ve brought some extra attention to Priest’s work but which he also didn’t seem to appreciate much—probably because Nolan told people to not read Priest’s book before watching his movie, which you have to admit is an asshole move. Speaking of assholes, I think the first time I heard of Priest was through the decades-long wait for Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions, the most famous SF book to never be published—until this year. I have thoughts on that. But Priest had spearheaded the controversy over Ellison seemingly refusing to finish his anthology with an essay called “The Last Deadloss Visions,” which got Priest a Hugo nomination. Incidentally, the final version of The Last Dangerous Visions had its publication announced shortly after Priest’s death. What timing, huh? I mean what are the odds J. Michael Straczynski would announce the upcoming release for TLDV one month after the death of its most ardent critic?

Anyway, “Palely Loitering” is my first Priest story, and while I’m ultimately mixed on it, I do have to admit it’s impressive. It’s a melancholy and mind-boggling time travel coming-of-age narrative that, given Locus classified it as a novella and the Hugos classified it as a novelette, seems to be one of those borderline cases in terms of length. I wish I had an ebook copy so I could run it through a word processor. I’m gonna be a bit liberal and side with Locus; it might come out to 18,000 or 18,500 words. People at the time were certainly impressed with “Palely Loitering,” as it won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Short Fiction.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1979 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It would reprinted in the Priest collection An Infinite Summer, named after the story Priest had given to Ellison for The Last Dangerous Visions and then retracted. It was anthologized in The Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #2 (ed. Terry Carr), The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF (ed. Mike Ashley), and As Time Goes By (ed. Hank Davis).

Enhancing Image

Mykle starts out as a ten-year-old boy, moody even for his age, the sole son in a well-to-do British family who sometimes wants to get away from his sisters. It’s the future, in what is called the “Neuopean” Union (Priest never explains this), and the UK seems to be stuck, or at a crossroads between different eras. “We lived in the age of starflight, but by the time I was born mankind had long lost the desire to travel in space,” Mykle tells us. A big way to pass the time is to go to Flux Channel Park, a park in the Victorian British fashion that started out as a rather quirky invention. The Park was originally a “flux-field,” built for experimental space flight, which the government decided to have converted into a tourist attraction after the last ship to be launched from the flux-field did not return after several years. The Park is basically home to a time distortion field, with the Flux Channel having three bridges, each with different time properties. One bridge acts normally, while another would send you 24 hours into the past, and the third would send you 24 hours into the future. The flux-field, the “channel” itself, is not to be played with.

So of course Mykle jumps onto the flux-field.

The stunt lands him not 24 hours into the future but 32 years, wherein he meets an older (although not by that much) man who helps him get back to his own time. I’m not really spoiling anything by saying this older man is a future version of Mykle, which even Mykle admits is an obvious turn of events. “Although the answer seems obvious in retrospect it was some years before I realized it,” he says. The older Mykle is, as the younger one puts it, “pompous and over-bearing,” being preoccupied with a young woman he considers to be the most beautiful in the world—so beautiful that he dares not talk to her. Listen, I think a lot of us went through “simp” phases in our youths. At the same time young Mykle isn’t wrong when he thinks his older self is being self-serious, although the Mykle now narrating (whom we can infer is much older than either past self) is more sympathetic to the young man’s plight. Something to keep in mind when reading this story is that Mykle-as-narrator is telling us about events that would’ve happened many years in the past, and that he ends up referring to multiple past selves across different points.

“Palely Loitering” is interesting, historically, as a very telling work of ’70s British literature. Mind you that at this point, in the late ’70s, there was basically no market for short SFF to speak of in the UK; the major outlets like New Worlds and Science Fantasy had gone the way of the dodo, and while several notable SFF magazines would be born in the ’70s in the US, the same cannot be said for the UK scene. No doubt “Palely Loitering” would’ve been published in the UK first had there been a viable option, as it is quintessentially a British narrative, being obviously written in the wake of an economic recession, the waning of public interest in space flight (the last people would’ve walked on the moon about five years prior to Priest writing “Palely Loitering”), some of the worst flare-ups of violence in Ireland, and all setting the stage for the Thatcher administration which came about shortly after this story’s publication. There are scars in the British character still very much lingering from World War II three decades later. It’s little wonder then that those with enough money would try to jump into either the past or the future, and also that the fashion and manners of these people would be out of step with what we would expect from people of the future. Mykle’s own style of narrating is rather mannered, even for an Englishman—unless he were emulating the speech of an Englishman of the 1870s and not the 1970s.

I do have a few questions regarding the logistics of the flux-field and the Park, which Priest does not answer. Mykle breaks away from his family and jumps onto the flux-field itself pretty easily, apparently without any railing or fencing to stop people from landing on it. This seems like an obvious security oversight. If touching the flux-field directly lands you at some point in the distant future, then how would you hope to get back to your time? Mykle gets lucky with help from his future self, but most people wouldn’t be so lucky. How often would this sort of thing happen? For the sake of legal drama surely it must not be a common occurrence, and yet it’s hard to imagine people not constantly going off the beaten path out of curiosity and stepping on the flux-field often, damn the consequences. Wouldn’t it also be easy to run into past and future versions of yourself, given how the bridges work? Of course, this last point plays into the story: it does make sense, to a degree, for Mykle to meet past and future versions of himself, although then one wonders why we don’t see this happen with other people in the story. The Park seems like a Jurassic Park-level disaster waiting to happen, built with what Mark E. Smith would call “the highest British attention to the wrong detail.” But then maybe its dubiousness is also part of the point.

Of course, any story involving time travel will inevitably become a heady matter, what with how the rules of the story’s interpretation of time travel work. Sometimes meeting a different version of yourself would cause a time paradox and make the universe reset itself, or something like that, but time paradoxes are obviously common in the world of “Palely Loitering”—possibly even encouraged by the builders of the Flux Channel Park. Mykle’s chance meeting with the young-adult version of himself and seeing the woman (named Estyll) the latter is obsessed with plants a seed in his head, which will eventually make him map out the exact spot in the flux-field where he landed the first time so he can go back to that same point in the future. Despite seeing her again, however, as Mykle gets older he becomes more withdrawn, more introverted—in a way more pathetic. “As I grew older, and became more influenced by my favorite poets, it seemed not only more sad and splendid to glorify [Estyll] from a distance, but appropriate that my role in her life should be passive.” Slowly but surely he becomes the young man he had previously written off as a hopeless romantic. He is his father’s son.

Mykle’s sister drift in different directions as they get older, but more importantly there’s a tragedy in the family as the father dies before his time, and for better or worse Mykle’s father was an important man. Still only a teenager at first, Mykle matures and learns to run his dad’s business, eventually becoming one of the more important men in England—yet still he can’t bring himself to say another word to Estyll, seeing her as some kind of ideal even after he marries a different woman and by all accounts is happy with her. The obsessions never leaves his mind for long; it’s the kind of longing that probably doesn’t happen in real life and certainly doesn’t happen in the modern age, rather being the sort of longing Lord Byron and his ilk would’ve written about a whole century prior. It’s clear that Estyll does not fascinate Mykle strictly as a person, but rather symbolizes something which cannot be found in the present moment—only either in the past or the future, which the Park literally has bridges to. It’s tempting to think Proust helped inspire the story, especially Mykle’s ponderous and at times melodramatic narrative voice, but Priest is dead now and will not be answering anymore.

There Be Spoilers Here

Good news, the ship that mysterious vanished all those years ago is now returning! Bad news, it can only land on the flux-field and that means the Park will have to be dismantled! This happens when Mykle is now 42 years old, so 32 years after that fateful day when he jumped onto the flux-field and landed… 32 years into the future. Hmmm. The back end of this story is a bit convoluted, since it involves a middle-aged Mykle realizing that not only can multiple versions of himself exist in the same space but that these different versions don’t necessarily come from the same continuity. Yes, we’re getting into multiverse shenanigans with this one, although it wasn’t called that at the time and was pretty far off from becoming a worn-out concept. Looking at the cover for this issue of F&SF again, I realize it’s technically a spoiler, as the shadowy men in coats and hats are different versions of Mykle; but it’s out of context, so it’s fine. The ending, wherein Mykle basically plays matchmaker and gets an alternate past version of himself to finally go out with Estyll, is honestly moving, even despite the matchmaking antics being confusing to read in the moment. My heartstrings were pulled.

A Step Farther Out

Part of me wonders what this story would’ve read like had it been written by an American, but after a couple days of thinking on it that has more to do with my bias against Victorian-style narration than a fault with the story. It does get rather convoluted, but Priest got a lot done with this short novella, implying a whole future world whilst keeping the action more or less restricted to a single stage. It’s moody, just the right amount of bittersweet at the end, and perhaps most importantly for modern readers, it hasn’t aged much because of the deliberately anachronistic setting. After reading “Palely Loitering” I decided to read all of “The Last Deadloss Visions,” and these two tell me I might be a Priest fan in the making. I should get back to Inverted World, and maybe check out The Affirmation…

See you next time.
The Observatory: For M. R. James, the Past Is Never Dead

April 15th, 2024

(Illustration by James McBryde, 1904.)

(Contains spoilers for “The Ash-Tree,” “A Warning to the Curious,” and “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.’”)

Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 and died in 1936, incidentally the same year as Rudyard Kipling; and with that, English literature lost two of its finest writers of the supernatural. It wasn’t the only thing they had in common: they were both conservatives of a breed that seemed to die out following the erosion of the British empire, both given to a distrust of women (Kipling more explicitly), both seeming to be relics of a prior age—a status which makes them a bit of a challenge for modern readers. More endearingly, both were consummate and compulsive storytellers. Kipling read stories to his children while James often wrote his stories with the intention of reading them aloud to his friends, which he would then do at Christmastime gatherings. They can’t help it; it’s like a second language for them. But whereas Kipling wrote almost every kind of story then conceivable (adventure, fantasy, science fiction, horror, you name it), James wrote only one kind of story: the ghost story. As he admits in “Stories I Have Tried to Write,” a brief but telling essay, “I never cared to try any other kind.” It’s a good thing he was perfect for such a niche job.

I’ve been reading some M. R. James as of late, or in a few cases rereading. I’ve said before that I’m a bit of a slow reader, and even then I struggle to retain information; but there’s also a pleasure in rereading something juicy, and James’s writing often demands closer examination. It’s occurred to me that James really was one of the best horror writers of his time, and he did this despite (by his own admission) being adept at only one specific kind of story. If you read five M. R. James stories in one day (which I wouldn’t recommend, because each requires at least some time to digest) then you will at some point feel like you’re reading five variations on the same story—the primordial M. R. James story which may not exist. “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “A Warning to the Curious” were written more than a decade apart, but read like the offspring of the same mother—or, to evoke the things lurking in the ash tree at the climax of that story, siblings in the same brood, belonging to the same monstrous spider-queen. To make a more film-nerd comparison, James’s fiction is sort of like the movies of Yasujirō Ozu, in that both artists seemed preoccupied with toying with the same set of ideas, creating works that are similar enough to each other, with subtle and at times profound differences.

In James’s case there is a tangible obsession with the distant past—in many cases the positively ancient past. This wasn’t just a hobby for the man, mind you. James was one of those writers who wrote relatively little fiction (his complete set of ghost stories has been printed in volumes under 500 pages) because he had a day job that both covered his ass financially and was respectable. He spent pretty much his whole adult life in academia, at a few different colleges, from undergrad all the way to senior positions. He was a professional medievalist, and he did not fuck around when it came to uncovering artifacts and works of architecture. If he were alive today he might be one of those “lost media” YouTubers, but ya know, more cultured. Something to keep in mind about James is that, being a Briton and living in the UK most of his life (he did like to travel), he had a first-hand conception of the ancient that filthy Americans like myself simply don’t have. For Americans the “ancient” past goes back to about the 1600s, but for someone who’s traveled through the UK and continental Europe this conception of the past goes back several more centuries. In this sense his story “The Ash-Tree” might be one of his most well-known, at least for American readers, because of its dealings with Puritans and the persecution of alleged witches—things Americans are likely to know about. Fans of Nathaniel Hawthorne will be sure to seek out this one especially.

But more often than not the terrors that haunt James’s protagonists are unspeakably old and ethereal, perhaps more monster than man. Not only are the living characters unable to communicate with these apparitions, but they’re barely even able to understand their existence in the physical world. You may be thinking there are only so many ways one can write about ghosts, or even imagine ghosts; but even comparing James to Kipling, or Montague Rhodes to Henry (that other great ghost story writer), shows that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Indeed, unlike the popular conception of ghosts up to the Edwardian period, James’s (I’m talking about M. R. now) ghosts are decidedly meaner, crueler, more unreasonable, and more impenetrable. Or, to quote H. P. Lovecraft in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in which he articulates James’s virtues better than I could:

In inventing a new type of ghost, [James] has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which moulds itself in bedding and shews a face of crumpled linen.

That latter description, by the way, applies to the ghost at the center of what is arguably James’s masterpiece, “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.’” This story, one of the finest ghost stories of all time, also happens to be a perfect encapsulation of James’s wants, fears, virtues, and limitations; it is a microcosm of everything relevant to and about M. R. James. We follow an academic, Professor Parkins, journeys to the coastal town of Burnstow (based on the real town of Felixstowe) for vacation, where he ends up golfing with a fellow at the same inn who mostly goes simply by “the Colonel.” Parkins gets word that there’s an attraction within walking distance of the inn that may be of interest to him: the site of a Templar preceptory, now mostly buried. The site would be at least 600 years old, and yet, England itself being such an old country, there might be something worth digging for. One day Parkins goes to the site as part of his beach walk, and digs out a whistle that, despite being caked in and clogged with dirt, remains miraculously intact. There’s writing on the whistle, in Latin, which Parkins can only partly make out, but which he translates as, “Who is this who is coming?” Having cleaned the whistle, and out of curiosity, he decides to use it. This is a mistake. The whistle’s owner has been dead for centuries, and yet upon Parkins’s discovering the whistle has been brought back into this world—first as a vague human-shaped specter that stalks Parkins on the beach and later taking possession of the aforementioned “crumpled linen.” This might be the only time in history the stereotypical bedsheet ghost is made threatening.

Everything is neatly laid out for us. We have an intellectual but sort of hapless protagonist, a pastoral locale that seems inviting but which houses an ancient evil (locations in James stories always seem either to be wide open spaces or storied buildings like cathedrals and old colleges, no in-between), a spirit of the distant past which is catapulted into the present by some cursed object, and ultimately an anti-intellectual message. For James, the past seems to always be just one bad move away from resurfacing, on a collision course with the present unbeknownst to the latter. The central character of “A Warning to the Curious” takes what is supposedly the last buried crown on England’s coasts, made to stave off foreign enemies, and draws the unwanted attention of something—and, even after returning the ancient crown to its rightful place, he pays for his transgression. Similarly the latest in a line of Puritan landowners falls prey to a witch’s curse that his ancestor had brought upon the family in “The Ash-Tree,” with the witch continuing to wreak vengeance long after her execution. According to James, the past is never dead—merely dormant. In cosmic horror a rule of thumb is to never alert the eldritch horror to your presence, but while James’s ghost stories are not cosmic, they do have a similar rule: do not wake that which is sleeping. All things considered, Parkins gets off lightly.

It’s funny to think that James would revolutionize the ghost story, since he was about as far removed from the revolutionary as is possible. He was a reactionary, a staunch anti-Modernist, a misogynist, and if contemporary accounts are to be believed, a bit of a man-child. He had no sense of worker solidarity, wasn’t remotely interested in making the world a better place, and seemed to be a walking goldmine of useless trivia (again, think “lost media” YouTuber); and yet it could be argued that this sheltered lifestyle, this state of being perpetually knee-deep in the past, had nurtured James’s writing rather than hindered it. Sure, you (possibly left-leaning reader—or maybe not) and I find the politics of, say, H. G. Wells, a lot more agreeable, but I don’t think Wells (at least young Wells) could’ve written such a menacing work of horror as “‘Oh, Whistle’” or “Count Magnus” or “Casting the Runes.” I’ve been having this thought, or rather question, tumbling around in my head lately: Is horror a conservative genre? Very loaded question, probably worthy of its own editorial at a later date. Historically some of the great horror writers were conservative, and certainly the best writers of ghost stories in particular have tended to be right-wing. It could be because conservatives go through life already being stalked by phantoms—by the specters of queerness, feminism, socialism, and what have you. M. R. James is a rare case where his artistry was often fabulous because of his backwards politics, and more specifically because of his crippling fear of the present.
Short Story Review: “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” by Ellen Kushner

April 13th, 2024

(Cover by Bob Eggleton. F&SF, September 1991.)

Who Goes There?

Author, anthologist, and (curiously) radio personality, Ellen Kushner has been active off and on since the early ’80s. As far as I can tell she’s one of those writers who basically works within the confines of a single genre—in this case fantasy. Her 1990 novel Thomas the Rhymer won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her Riverside universe is comprised of three novels plus a smattering of short fiction, of which today’s story is an example. “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” is a borderline sword-and-sorcery narrative and is, as Kristine Kathryn Rusch puts it in the introduction, “a coming of age story—with a twist.” Of course I won’t say what the twist is here, but this is one of those stories that’s arguably more pleasurable to think about with the gift of hindsight than it is to read in the moment. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It struck me enough that I’m now curious about picking up a couple of Kushner’s novels.

(Note: Truth be told, had I known about Kushner’s position on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as her support of certain loathsome personalities, before I had written this review, I probably would not have chosen a story of hers, nor would I have gone through the trouble of buying a couple of her novels like I said I would. It’s relatively easy to put aside an author’s shitty politics when they’ve been dead for years, as is often the case with this site, but not so when one can support the author with shitty politics monetarily. It’s a mistake I hope not to repeat often.)

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted digitally in Strange Horizons, although you’d have to use the Wayback Machine to find that now. More conveniently it was reprinted digitally in Fantasy Magazine, which you can find here. Sadly Fantasy Magazine closed its doors late last year, so there will probably come a point when the site will shut down and you’ll have to use the Wayback Machine as well. For print appearances we have The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifth Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling), In Lands That Never Were: Tales of Swords and Sorcery from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ed. Gordon Van Gelder), and more recent editions of Swordspoint that include a few short stories set in the Riverside universe.

Enhancing Image

This story begins and ends with a wound. Richard St. Vier, master swordsman, has just taught some punk a lesson. This is a coming-of-age story, but not for Richard, who is already a fully-formed person and who for all I know could be the hero of another story set in the Riverside universe. Speaking of which, Riverside itself is sort of a red light district, “beyond reach of the law,” where Richard lives with his scholar friend Alec. The two make an odd couple, a brains-and-brawn pair that would probably strike people as funny in more civilized corners of the city, hence their residing in Riverside. “It would not have been a safe place for a man like Alec, who barely knew one end of a knife from another; but the swordsman St. Vier had made it clear what would happen to anyone who touched his friend.” It’s sort of unclear how platonic the two are, given some exchanges much later on, which would fit in with Kushner’s playing with sex and gender. Maybe they’re just roommates. Anyway, after the opening fight Richard is chilling when he’s confronted with a boy who’s probably barely in his teens, and whom he at first mistakes for a girl. The boy wants to work for the master swordsman as a servant, but Richard’s not interested. It’s clear the boy wants to become an apprentice, but Richard’s not biting.

In under 5,000 words we’re given a vivid picture of Riverside as a semi-historic low-fantasy setting, where magic doesn’t seem to play a part in the average person’s life, but at the same time this is certainly not the Renaissance of our world. It’s hostile and at the same time cozy, in a weird way. It could be because the stakes of this particular story are low. It’s essentially a slice-of-life narrative that will—without the reader realizing it—turn into something else, albeit without ever turning into an adventure. This is about relationships, about how characters perceive each other, and how the reader perceives these characters. There’s a bit of foreshadowing that I didn’t even catch the first time around with regards to the true identity of one of these characters. Despite being “friends” officially, jokey remarks between Richard and Alec imply maybe a friends-with-benefits relationships. (These two are so gay together it’s insane.) In short, it’s about deception, or at least lying by way of omission. Kushner is playing some tricks on the reader, but in a friendly, unpretentious way, which at first doesn’t seem serious but which provides some real food for thought. It helps that Kushner’s style is so breezy and so affable, such that it doesn’t surprise me this story would be reprinted online twice. When it appeared in the November 2011 issue of Fantasy Magazine it would’ve been two decades old, but it fits in neatly with short fantasy being published for the first time in the 2010s.

On returning home by himself, “in a cul-de-sac off the main street; part of an old townhouse, a discarded veteran of grander days,” Richard finds the lights are out on the first floor—but there’s someone inside. Not one to take chances, Richard takes out his sword and is about to enter slowly, only for a “small woman” to throw herself on him in desperation, pleading for protection. This is all pretty strange, Richard thinks, but out of sheer politeness he lets the girl into his apartment, albeit with caution. Eventually Alec comes home and assumes Richard really did get a servant, in a misunderstanding, but is pretty chill with the girl sharing the apartment for the night. (And oh my goodness, Richard and Alec are sleeping in the same bed, this is too much.) The next morning, however, and things are not what they had seemed before, for the girl turned out to be the teen boy mentioned earlier in disguise. I have to quote this exchange here since it a) it’s funny, and b) it neatly sums up the story’s gender-bending antics:

St. Vier eased himself onto his elbows. “Which are you, an heiress disguised as a snotty brat, or a brat disguised as an heiress?”

“Or,” Alec couldn’t resist adding, “a boy disguised as a girl disguised as a boy?”

It’s been a few days since I read “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death,” partly because I had to let it simmer and also because I was feeling some mild burnout with writing, but since then I’ve come to appreciate how tightly knit this one is. For a story now over thirty years old it still feels “modern,” between the queerness, Kushner’s very readable style, and what turns out to be a striking thesis hidden in plain sight. (By the way, I suspect the queerness still holds up perfectly because Kushner herself is a queer writer, being bisexual.) Speaking of the thesis, you may be wondering, “If the damsel being a boy in disguise is the twist, then what would count as spoilers?” You see, that’s not the real twist…

There Be spoilers Here

Kushner bamboozled us, but goddamn it, she bamboozles us yet again! Alec’s joke earlier is almost correct, except it turns out the genders are reversed: it’s a girl disguised as a boy disguised as a girl. Now isn’t this confusing? The girl-as-boy, who trains with Richard and proves to not be a hopeless case but gets wounded in the process, has her true identity revealed. (You could theorize the girl is actually a trans boy, or at least an egg, but it’d only be a vague implication, and anyway there’s already enough going on that we probably don’t need further complications. At the same time this story was basically tailor-made for genderqueer readings.) Alec pulls a book with a blood stain on it out of the girl’s breast pocket, titled The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death (in a bit of a meta move), an erotic chivalric romance that, coincidentally, Alec’s sister also had. “It’s about some Noble girl who comes home from a ball and finds a swordsman waiting in her room for her. He doesn’t kill her; he fucks her instead. She loves it. The End.” In this case the swordsman doesn’t kill the girl, but he doesn’t fuck her either; yet there’s undoubtedly a symbolic deflowering as the girl gets her first taste of swordplay and bleeds for it. The metaphor is pretty blunt, but so effective that it made me reevaluate the story up to this point. Rusch wasn’t lying—it is indeed a coming-of-age narrative, a gender-bending symbolic taking of a girl’s virginity that’s at once traumatic and liberating. This is the kind of juicy material that made me buy two of Kushner’s books.

A Step Farther Out

At first I was wondering what Kushner was up to with this one, since at first it seemed like a pretty standard low-ish fantasy yarn with a stoic tough-guy swordsman at the center—only to find out the tough guy is not the point. Kushner plays with gender and symbolism in a way that is somehow both blunt (it’s pretty hard to miss) and yet timeless. It starts as one thing but then becomes a protracted metaphor for a young woman’s first sexual experience. An unexpected turn of events, but this is one of those surprises that caught me in its trap in the best of ways.

See you next time.