A short and sweet review forecast for this month, partly because I’m running behind on my writing a bit and so am pressed for time, but also because I don’t have a particular theme in mind here. Of course, if you thought I was gonna take a break from reviewing spooky fiction altogether after last month, you’d be mistaken, as both of the short stories due for November are horror pieces. We’re still deep in autumn, after all, and honestly my thirst for spooky shit has not been quenched.
Another thing I just randomly decided to throw in there is that both of the serials are novels written in collaboration, by authors who gained a good deal of acclaim and presumably money from working together. In one case there’s decades-long besties Larry Niven and the late Jerry Pournelle, who shared similar politics and also writing philosophies. There’s also the husband-wife duo of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, perennial favorites on this site, who wrote most of their novels together, although for decades Fury has been erroneously credited to just Kuttner.
We’ve got one story from the 1850s (the oldest I will have reviewed thus far), two from the 1940s, two from the 1970s, and one from the 2000s.
For the serials:
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, August to October 1975. Niven had quickly established himself as one of the major hard SF writers by the end of the ’60s, but Pournelle had a longer road to success, first being active as a fan and then not writing his first stories and articles professionally till he was deep in his thirties. In the ’70s and ’80s Niven and Pournelle wrote several successful novels in collaboration.
Fury by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1947. Kuttner and Moore wrote so much, both together and each solo, that they resorted to a few pseudonyms, one of them being Lawrence O’Donnell. Fury takes place in the same universe as the earlier Kuttner-Moore story “Clash by Night.” Despite Fury historically being credited to Kuttner alone, Moore claimed years later to having been a minor collaborator.
For the novellas:
“Against the Fall of Night” by Arthur C. Clarke. From the November 1948 issue of Startling Stories. Clarke is one of the most famous SF writers ever, to the point that by the ’60s he had become, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, a media personality. He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey whilst writing the novel version parallel to it.
“The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison. From the March 1970 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Ellison is similarly a pretty famous (if more controversial) figure, being just as notorious for his real-life antics and combative nature as for his writing. This novella, one of Ellison’s longest stories, works as a standalone but was commissioned as part of a series which features the same main character.
For the short stories:
“The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell. From the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. First published in 1852. Now here’s a name you probably didn’t see coming. For someone who gained notoriety as one of the finest novelists of the mid-Victorian period, as well as being Charlotte Brontë’s first major biographer, Gaskell also wrote a fair amount of supernatural fiction.
“I Live with You” by Carol Emshwiller. From the March 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By this point Carol had outlived her late husband, Ed Emshwiller, by over a decade, but she had long since made a name for herself. The last Emshwiller story I wrote about was from the late ’50s, but nearly half a century later we still find her seemingly in her prime.
(Cover by Stanislaw Fernandes. Omni, October 1987.)
Who Goes There?
Happy Halloween, ghouls and gals!
George R. R. Martin is now one of the most famous American authors alive, but this was not always the case. When he made his professional debut in the early ’70s he was just another post-New Wave writer who wanted desperately to be published in Analog, as he idolized (and still idolizes, really) John W. Campbell. In a bit of a cruel twist of fate, Martin didn’t make his first sale to Analog until right after Campbell’s death, but that didn’t stop him from appearing in that magazine regularly throughout the ’70s and ’80s. Martin started his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series in 1996, but prior to that his career was a lot more winding—one might say directionless, but I prefer to think of the first couple decades of his career as showing Martin at his most versatile. He wrote science fiction, fantasy, and horror in more or less equal measure, although he’s admitted to being perhaps a horror writer by instinct. This is easy enough to believe, even for someone who only knows Martin for his big series, considering the monsters, zombies, ghouls, and remorseless killers which populate A Song of Ice and Fire. For better or worse (he has his reactionary/boomer moments), Martin is our biggest connection to an era of genre writing that is long past us, to the point where a lot of current readers have no personal memory of it and no passion to dig up its bones. He’s the one living author I know who has enough clout to make young readers check out the works of Jack Vance.
My experiences with Martin have been a bit mixed over the years, since I have to admit I’m not keen on his big fantasy series from what little I’ve read of it; but at the same time I do like his early SF and horror a lot more. This month has been kind of a wash for me, as far as getting my spooky shit on goes, with movies and also reads, even what I’ve been reviewing here as of late. The good news is that we’re going out on a high note, because “The Pear-Shaped Man” is a darn good tale of paranoia and suspense, being quite effective while also seeing Martin on his best behavior. Understandably it won the Stoker for Best Long Fiction that year, although at maybe 13,000 words it’s not that long.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October 1987 issue of Omni. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), Omni Best Science Fiction Two (ed. Ellen Datlow), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners (ed. Joe R. Landsdale), and the Martin collection Dreamsongs: Volume I.
Enhancing Image
Jessie is freelance book illustrator (the narrator jokes that this is not a “real” job) who’s moved into an apartment recently, and so far everything has been going about as expected. She has a few friends and she gets enough work that she won’t be homeless in a week. There is one problem, though, which has to do with the man who lives in the apartment building’s basement. The man, as far as anyone can tell, does not have a name, for even the tenants who have lived here for years don’t know what it is, despite all of them having interacted with him at some point or other. “All of them, every one, called him the Pear-shaped Man. That was who he was.” He’s a man of unusual proportions, being certainly chubby, but with his torso being (predictabtly) pear-shaped: narrow at the shoulders, yet with a real dump-truck of an ass. His head is described as like a small pear on top of the big pear that is his body. Nobody in the building really likes him, but he’s someone who generally keeps to himself, even with his strange habit of seeming to only eat cheese curls of a specific brand and drink Coke. This would be considered par for the course with YouTubers and Twitch streamers in the current year, but it would’ve been strange back in the days when people cared about balancing one’s diet. The Pear-shaped Man lives right below Jessie and her roommate Angela, but while the latter is chill about the man’s eccentricity, Jessie quickly finds a bone to pick.
“The Pear-Shaped Man” is example of what we would call apartment horror, which sounds specific but actually has some room for a variety of fun (or maybe not-so-fun) times. It could have to do with getting a roommate who turns out to be a psychopath, neighbors who are secretly murderous cultists, neglectful management (as if there’s any other kind), or some combination. Maybe there’s a Lovecraftian monstrosity lurking in the water pipes, or maybe (to take from a certain Lovecraft story) the air conditioning stops working on the worst of days. It’s a kind of horror that could’ve only sprouted in a post-industrial urban society, and the more people are packed together like sardines the better. Apartment horror stands on the diametrically opposite end of the spectrum from rural horror, since whereas rural horror often goes into a sense of isolation and what little human company there is being off, apartment horror tackles terrors that are unique to the urban experience. It’s also an example of another kind of horror story, albeit more a twist on it than a straight example: the tormented-woman story. I wish there was a better name for it, but it’s a very old and proud tradition in the genre, in which you have a woman (it’s usually a woman) of questionable mental stability who finds herself suffering at the hands of an antagonist, sometimes unseen but other times hiding in plain sight. Here, the supposed antagonist tormenting Jessie is a man whom everyone in the building already knows about, and who to all appearances hasn’t done anything except act in a way that doesn’t abide social norms; the worst thing he’s done is be kind of a weirdo.
Now, I say this is a twist on the tradition, because Jessie really ends up being her own worst enemy, to the point of being a Karen. She is clearly in the midst of a psychotic break, but she also acts entitled—not that the people around her are exactly innocent. She repeatedly has dreams about having a weirdly sexual encounter with the Pear-shaped Man, and her obsession gets to the point where she unconsciously paints his features in an illustration, which her boss doesn’t take too kindly. This is the kind of thing one would seek professional help for, but not only does Jessie fail to consider this, but her friends and acquaintances actively choose to make the situation worse once or twice. Martin walks a bit of a tightrope here, because on the one hand Jessie is not the most likable of protagonists, being bitchy, whiny, and something of a Greenwich Village-type hipster, but also she seems to be suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness. She talks with Selby, the apartment manager, in trying to persuade him to dig up the Pear-shaped Man’s lease so that he can be identified, which as Selby’s justified to point out is a big invasion of the man’s privacy; and yet the fact that he doesn’t seem to even have a lease should in itself be concerning, never mind that he only ever pays rent with cash, and single-dollar bills at that. (This feels like a plot point that could’ve only been plausible at least thirty years ago, since nowadays rent is fucking astronomical unless you live in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere.) It doesn’t help that even though he hasn’t done anything, the Pear-shaped Man stood outside watching Jessie’s place for an uncomfortable amount of time on one occasion, and during the few times they interact he wants her to come see his “things.” Nowadays this would be considered stalking and/or harassment.
There’s a sexism angle to “The Pear-Shaped Man” that goes unsaid, which is probably for the best since my experience with Martin has taught me that he can be unreliable on feminist issues. So much the better that Jessie’s plight being elevated by men who by and large don’t take her seriously is kept as subtext, then. Really, what’s impressive about this story, considering Martin’s habits as a writer the pop up now and again, is that’s both subtle in a psychological sense while also building tension at just the right pace. This is a novelette, like I said about 13,000 words, but it feels a bit shorter than that. Early in his career Martin was prone to writing mood pieces, stories in which not much actually happens and there’s a focus on character and vibes, but with “The Pear-Shaped Man” he found a right balance of character and action. Previously I’d only written about Martin early in his career, whereas this story shows someone who is both a seasoned professional and in his element. He can be as gory and erotic as he wants later, with A Song of Ice and Fire, but with his earlier fiction, mostly printed in magazines, he feels the need to restrain himself at least a little bit. The descriptions of the Pear-shaped Man as this grotesque figure, his skin unnaturally pale and his fingers like worms or maggots, spark one’s imagination and may even gross you out a bit, but Martin doesn’t overdo it.
There Be Spoilers Here
Not a negative criticism, but the ending is a very strange one. I was unnerved a bit, but also confused. I don’t even wanna give it away here, both because I’m not entirely sure what happened (it’s clearly meant to be taken as metaphorical rahter than literal, but that doesn’t help much), and because I do recommend this story quite a bit and I think a first-time reader should go into it blind up to a point.
A Step Farther Out
Recently I had read Martin’s Fevre Dream, which is one of his few standalone novels and certainly the most well-known novel of his that isn’t part of that series; and while I enjoyed it, I also kept wishing it was about a hundred pages shorter, with the third act being tightened up massively. Martin, like any writrr with two brain cells to rub together, writes for money, and the horror market in the ’80s called for novels that were unnecessarily large and horizontally challenged. With short fiction, though, one still had the restraints one needed to write something that could be frightening and chilling, sure, but also calculated. I very much recommend “The Pear-shaped Man” as an introduction to George R. R. Martin the horror writer, as opposed to George R. R. Martin the fantasist, assuming you haven’t already read “Sandkings,” which sees Martin in both horror and SF mode. I do love “Sandkings,” by the way.
(Cover by Pete Kuhlhoff. Weird Tales, September 1946.)
Who Goes There?
Born in 1904, Edmond Hamilton was, along with friend and close contemporary Jack Williamson, one of the last of the classic SF pulp writers, and one of the few of that type to survive the raising of standards for SF writing that came about during the World War II years. He tried but failed to strike a business relationship with John W. Campbell, but found Campbell’s criteria to be too exacting and finicky, so he was to appear regularly in just about every genre magazine of the era that Campbell wasn’t editing. In the pre-war years Hamilton was known for his quite literally world-shattering space opera, being one of the pioneers of that subgenre; but whereas E. E. Smith captured readers’ imaginations with his novels, Hamilton stuck to the short story and novella early in his career, and he also deliberately mixed horror elements in with his SF. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that he had made his debut in Weird Tales, and was maybe the most consistent contributor of “weird-scientific” stories for that magazine. He remained loyal to Weird Tales until it shut down (not for the last time) in 1954. So we have a story today that’s not really horror at all, but rather is SF that could’ve just as well have been published in Startling Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories at the time. This is also one of those cases where I checked out the story based on the nifty magazine cover it inspired.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September 1946 issue of Weird Tales. It’s only been reprinted twice, in The Last Man on Earth (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh) and the Hamilton collection The Best of Edmond Hamilton.
Enhancing Image
As you can guess from the cover, this story involves anthropomorphized animals, or more accurately animals that have been unintentionally uplifted via atom-bomb-induced mutation. Hahl and his comrade S’San, a dog-man and a cat-man respectively, are minding their own business when a star passes over them, passing so close in fact that it crashes in the Crying Stones, an island that is forbidden to the Clans. The Clans are of course communities of different humanoid animals, including dogs, cats, foxes, and even horses. These beast-people are akin to those poor mutilated creatures in The Island of Doctor Moreau; but whereas the beast-folk in that novel are in a state of constant agony, their equivalents in “Day of Judgment” don’t have too bad a life—even barring the nuclear devastation they’ve been born into. Hahl, being a dog, if one that walks on two legs, is curious about this fallen star, going against S’San’s warnings. Naturally the fallen star turns out to be a spaceship that’s landed on the island, home to two humans, a man and a woman. When I reviewed Peter Phillips’s very good (and chilling) “Lost Memory” not long ago I went into some detail about how humankind getting back into contact with one of our robot or animal companions might turn out badly, but this is not so much case with the humans in Hamilton’s story. For one, it’s been long enough since the nuclear holocaust wrecked the world (several dog generations we’re told) that the radiation has long since died down. Also, while the humans are outnumbered, they do have futuristic weapons, whereas the beast-folk have not yet gotten past the stone-and-spear phase. Still, their first meeting is a rough one.
Unfortunately “Day of Judgment” is not very interesting on its own, although it is interesting when taken in the context of a certain strand of SF that proliferated in the years immediately following WWII, that being the tale of nuclear anxiety/depression. I wrote an editorial on this topic some months back, because it’s a topic that informs a great deal of SF published from about 1946 to 1960. There were stories beforehand that speculated on the use of a theoretical nuclear weapon, but following the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki there came along a new subspecies of SF story, written from an American or at least Allied perspective, about a world in which humanity has disfigured or destroyed itself with atom bombs. There are too many examples to count, but some notable ones include Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Judith Merrill’s “That Only a Mother,” Theodore Sturgeon’s “Memorial,” A. E. van Vogt’s “Dormant,” and perhaps the ultimate post-nuclear story of the era, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. These are at times melancholy and outright pitch-black stories in tone, and it’s strange to think these are coming from people who were on the winning side. Hamilton himself was a hawk who supported America’s involvement in WWII and later (more regrettably) Vietnam, although he was not the the screaming cold warrior that Robert Heinlein was. Even someone with Hamilton’s politics could see that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would likely be a losing game for everybody. The human couple in “Day of Judgment” have returned from a failed Venus colony, only to find Earth has been bereft of human life for a hot minute now, replaced by intelligent beast-people.
The immediate question is what ought to be done with these humans, as they could well present a threat to the Clans, but the thematic question is whether humanity, in the wake of the nuclear age, deserves a second chance. This is Hamilton, who for how dark he can be at times is not as much a pessimist as his wife (Leigh Brackett), so you can guess.
There Be Spoilers Here
A trial ensues among the clans, with the humans being in a position where they might be executed; of course they won’t be, which is a bit of a shame, since a bleaker ending would’ve elevated this story a bit. I’d like to take a moment to talk about a gripe I have with Trondor, the leader of the horse clan, and his ilk: these fuckers stand on their hind legs, which are hoofed. This simply doesn’t work. Humans are able to walk on two legs because of a lack of a real tail, and more importantly we have feet with flexible toes which are good for keeping ourselves balanced. If someone loses even one toe on one of their feet they find it more difficult to stay balanced when standing, so imagine not having any toes on your feet. I can take cat and dog furries, but I draw the line at horse-people with hooves instead of clawed or fingered toes. Anyway, that was my TED talk.
A Step Farther Out
I would say I’m sorry for the delay, but I didn’t have too much to say about this one and I’m not sure how many cared to hear what I had to say. This is the second time I’ve reviewed Edmond Hamilton and the second time I’ve come away feeling rather indifferent, which sucks because I’ve read enough of his work outside the confines of this site that I know he’s capable of a good deal better. Then again, he wrote a lot, and since he wrote as a way to make a living, he didn’t spend much time on revising his work. He’s a relic from a bygone era, but I don’t mean that in an insulting way.
Kathe Koja started getting professionally published in the late ’80s, as part of a generation of new horror and SF writers, appearing more or less fully formed with her short fiction. It didn’t take long for her to write her debut novel, The Cipher, which I’m actually in the middle of reading as I’m reviewing today’s story. Koja’s fiction is a lot more colloquial and more visceral than the work of close contemporary and fellow Michigander Thomas Ligotti; whereas Ligotti unabashedly owes a debt to Lovecraft, Koja can be considered more in line with the movies of David Cronenberg. The first decade of Koja’s career saw her often mixing horror with SF in a way that still feels novel, if only because there’s also a distinctly ’90s grunge sensibility with her early work. After a hiatus, she switched gears to writing YA and historical fiction, which might go to explain why it’s rather hard to find her stuff in bookstores these days. The Cipher and her third novel, Skin, recently got brought back into print thanks to a certain independent press, but her early work remains sadly obscure. “Reckoning” itself has hints of speculative fiction, but while it’s primarily horror, its top priority is to function as a domestic tragedy.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s only been reprinted once, in the Koja collection Extremities, which itself is very out of print.
Enhancing Image
Drew is a down-on-his-luck artist, or more accurately he’s a bit too lazy and a bit too much of a drunkard for his own good. His relationship with his girlfriend Lucy turns from bad to worse as she dies in a car accident shortly after the two have a major fight. As sadly happens too often in real life, their final interaction is a bitter one, and this combined with Lucy’s death sends Drew into a beer-tinged spiral. Just when it seems like he has a chance to at least get back on his feet professionally, with an art commission, he does everything except work on said commission, including sleeping in his car on the side of the road. With his car parked outside an abandoned shed/garage (it’s not made clear which), Drew has a chance encounter with a woman who reminds him of a certain someone he knows, except she puts her hands on him seemingly with the goal of suffocating him. This ends up not being the case, though, as the woman is Lucy, suddenly alive and well again—except for the fact that her skin is a bit paler than before, and more conspicuously her eyes are now solid silver in color.
But hey, nobody’s perfect.
The reanimated Lucy, aside from looking a bit off, is otherwise the Lucy Drew had known in life. Indeed she and the others who live in the woods here can only be considered zombies by virtue of the fact that these are all people who have died before, and who all similarly have pale skin and the silvery “angel eyes.” Norah, who for all intents and purposes is the leader of the group, talks in fluent Expositionese, explaining to Drew that a) he himself is still very much alive, and b) the undead retain both their memories and personalities from before. These are not raging bloodthirsty monsters, but simply people who have gone through something pretty strange and unexplainable. The only exception is Wesley, the only man of the pack, being stanoffish and “obviously seriously strange,” but this is explained by him being a suicide, and generally he prefers to keep to himself. We’re led to expect at first that Wesley might become the story’s villain, but this is a red herring; he’s barely in it to begin with. The three main characters are Drew, Lucy, and Norah, and even then the crux of the whole story is Drew and Lucy’s complicated relationship. What do you say to someone who used to be the love of your life and who has not only been dead (from your POV) for eight months but someone you remember hurting deeply the last time you two were together?
“Reckoning” is a horror story, but only nominally; it’s not like Koja’s chief goal here is to scare or unnerve the reader. The subject matter is morbid, and in a way this is a story about zombies (although Lucy and the others explicitly don’t call themselves that), but it’s at least as much a love story. Well, it’s not a happy love story, but then how many upbeat love stories worth a damn are there? Drew and Lucy have sex maybe one too many times in such a short span, but in a way I get it. I mentioned that there’s a viseral edge to Koja’s writing, which includes candid descriptions of physical intimacy. Sex for Koja, as with Cronenberg, plays a major role in tandem with the horror, both for the sake of eroticism and also to be juxtaposed with the grimness of the surrounding material. Drew is arguably having sex with a corpse, never mind that Lucy’s angel eyes are uncanny. The eyes themselves apparently give the undead second sight, like in The Dead Zone (oh hey, it’s Cronenberg again, albeit adatping Stephen King), although Lucy and Norah are at odds as to whether these eyes let one see into the future. Believe it or not, of her early stories I would say “Reckoning” is on the tamer end. The eroticism here is pretty vanilla, compared to “Angels in Love,” the last Koja story I wrote about, which does go into fucked-up territory.
I will say that Koja’s style is not for everyone, being rather vulgar and snappy in a way that may have resulted from both the first wave of cyberpunk (already come and gone by the time Koja made her debut) and the incoming grunge era. There’s something about Koja’s early ’90s work that screams flannel and faded jeans. For better or worse, Drew being a fuck-up with no money and no direction in life sort of encapsulates the existential malaise Gen X Americans at this point in time. That Lucy and the others have each other’s company but very little else, living on the fringes of society and afraid to go out amongst “normal” people for fear of being discovered, works as like a collective counterpart to Drew’s individualistic problems. Both the individual and the group are in a rut, a post-Reagan point of post-nut clarity as the Cold War is ending with the US winning over the Soviets and yet nobody being happier for all this.
There Be Spoilers Here
Drew and Lucy’s relationship is tragic, first because of the circumstances of the latter’s death and second because the former is still alive. The bulk of “Reckoning” sees Drew caught between two worlds which happen to exist on the same land, the world of the living and the much smaller world of the undead. At some point, something will have to give: either Drew leaves Lucy and the others behind for the sake of returning to a life that was not a very good one anyway, or he dies. It’s obvious which option Koja will take, although I have to say I’m not keen on how she gets there. Word has gotten around about the not-zombies, and a small gang of young hunters goes looking in the woods, thinking they’ve gotten one when they shoot Drew dead, only to find he does not have the angel eyes they had heard of. I have a question as to what’s supposed to happen with these characters Koja pulled out of thin air, considering they committed a murder and they don’t act too concerned about having done such a thing. I also have to wonder what the hell they could expect to do if they had caught one of the undead. Is there prize money? Would they get it taxidermized? It’s still a person, so I feel like there would be a huge legal problem. These questions are none of Drew’s concern, of course, on account of him being dead at the end—or rather undead. It’s a nicely bittersweet ending, but I feel like Koja could’ve gotten us to this point more elegantly.
A Step Farther Out
This was a decent read, although it doesn’t show Koja at her best. When it comes to reprints of genre stories by women, from the time before the internet or even when the internet was in its infancy, there’s an unmistakable tendency for anthology editors to underrepresent female talent. It can be hard to gauge what’s the really good stuff in advance and do the necessary weeding-out when it comes to women writing SFF up until the past couple decades. In the case of “Reckoning” it’s understandable why it’s only been reprinted once since its initial publication, since there are at least a few Koja stories I recommend reading first.
(Dark Forces. Cover by One Plus One Studio. The Viking Press, 1980.)
Something I don’t typically get to write about here is the topic of original anthologies, which is to say anthologies of short fiction comprised of material never before published. Of course, said fiction could later be reprinted in magazines, as has happened many times, but the implied purpose of an original anthology is fundamentally different from that of its sibling, the reprint anthology. Both involve similar work, with an editor trying to procure stories from authors or authors’ estates, as well as reading dozens upon dozens of stories, most of which end up not being worth printing. There’s the question of how many words/pages can be crammed between two covers. There’s the question of pricing, because an anthology will pretty much always be more expensive than a single magazine issue. Nowadays anthologies and magazines fill respective niches and try not to step on each other’s toes, since it’s no longer a problem of what can be printed in magazines, whereas in the days before Fortnite and even the internet there was the (true, at least up to a point) conventional narrative that editors and publishers of original anthologies were allowed to be more risqué than their magazine counterparts.
When Dangerous Visions hit shelves in 1967, its key appeal (at least for American readers) was that it was jam-packed with stories that could not be published in magazines of the era, on account of being too edgy, experimental, etc. You had a thick book (over 500 pages) from a mainstream publisher (Doubleday) with an all-star cast of authors, all of whom at least claimed to be putting forth their most mind-bending and transgressive material yet. You had such top talents as Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and so on, and commissioning this stuff could not have been cheap. The gambit paid off in spades, though. Dangerous Visions sold very well, remains in print to this day (a rarity for an anthology, especially an original one), and it even won a special Hugo. That Harlan Ellison, the editor, never quite recaptured that lightning, is beside the point. Not every story was a winner, but Dangerous Visions was the right book that entered the market at just the right time, serving as a harbinger of the New Wave. Just as importantly, publishers realized that there was some money to be made with original anthologies—maybe not on the same scale as Dangerous Visions, but rather cheap paperbacks of maybe half the size and half the number of stories; and maybe these books wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel like their inspiration did, but instead took on more humble mission statements. You can have editors who are maybe not as discerning as Ellison was, who would also get the work done in a timelier fashion. It was a matter of quantity over quality.
There a meteor shower, or maybe a oversaturation, of original paperback anthologies from the late ’60s through much of the ’70s, until that particular bubble burst. These were books that often focused on science fiction, rather than fantasy or horror, although there was a trickle-down effect with those other genres. Still, standards had dripped, in large part (although he was not the sole offender) due to Roger Elwood’s extremely prolific tenure as editor for a few different publishers; the number of anthologies he edited between 1972 and 1976 alone is staggering. While he was able to procure work from big names, this work ran a good chance of being mid- to low-tier stuff that would’ve likely stayed on the shelf. A major exception was Epoch, which Elwood co-edited with Robert Silverberg, a lavish and well-received book, placing first in the Locus poll that year; but this is indeed an exception that proves the rule. By the end of the ’70s the market for original anthologies had inevitably gone into decline.
Meanwhile, in the waning days of the original anthology, Kirby McCauley made his living as a New York-based literary agent with some big talent on his hands. By 1980 he had already edited one well-received original horror anthology, with 1976’s Frights, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection. Frights was a hardcover original from St. Martin’s Press with a nice wraparound cover, but while McCauley procured stories by some of the top talent in horror at the time, including Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman, he found that he wanted to go one step further. The introduction for Dark Forces makes McCauley’s intentions with this bulky new anthology clear. McCauley’s inspiration was twofold, between August Derleth’s work as head of Arkham House and wanting to make a horror-themed counterpart to Dangerous Visions. Arkham House in its prime printed hardcover volumes with exquisite covers, all these being focused on horror, SF, and dark fantasy, from reprints of H. P. Lovecraft’s work to collections of never-before-published fiction by fresh young writers. McCauley grew up on books of horror that Derleth had edited, so in that way he overtly pays tribute to a fallen (Derleth had died in 1971) master of the field. The relationship that Dark Forces has with Dangerous Visions is more complicated, however, as there are a few major differences in how these books’ respective editors went about their businesses.
Consider that when Harlan Ellison edited Dangerous Visions, a process that took about two years, he was coming at it from the perspective of a reasonably successful author, which is to say he was a writer, first and foremost, as opposed to an editor or agent. This lack of experience with editing eventually came back to bite Ellison in the ass, with the shitshow that was the making of Again, Dangerous Visions, and far more infamously with The Last Dangerous Visions; but in the ’60s, it was novel for a writer with practically no editing experience to work with his fellow writers in such a way. Conversely, McCauley had already proven his ability with an original anthology, plus a couple reprint anthologies, and he was enough of a professional that he understood how to work with writers as people, and not just as practitioners of a certain craft. In the introduction he recounts his encouraging relationship with Stephen King while the latter wrote (first as a novelette, then ballooning into a long novella) The Mist. He also recounts having a get-together with Isaac Bashevis Singer in the latter’s apartment (they were both New Yorkers, and thus there had to be some inherent sense of kinship there), just months before Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. King and Singer are radically different in just about every way, in work ethic, style, and worldview, the former a flaming-liberal New Englander and the latter a conservative Polish-Jewish immigrant; yet McCauley makes it appear easy to work with both.
You may have noticed also that Singer is not a name that comes up much, if at all, in horror circles, because while a good portion of his fiction involves the supernatural, he’s not a “horror writer.” Thus we have another big difference between Dangerous Visions and Dark Forces, because while Ellison reached out to everyone in the SF field he could get his hands on, McCauley reached outside the field of horror and dark fantasy, the result being that there are authors in Dark Forces who are not primarily horror writers, and there are even a few who are known to be “literary” types. It’s not so unusual today, but back in 1980 it was a novelty for acclaimed novelist (and prolific tweeter) Joyce Carol Oates to appear in a horror anthology. You have some of the usual suspects of horror from that period (King, Campbell, even Robert Bloch late in his career, etc.), but you also have a really left-field choice like Davis Grubb, who was known at the time as author of The Night of the Hunter. You have writers like Edward Bryant and Joe Haldeman who, while they have sometimes written horror, are much more known for writing science fiction. You have a surprise appearance from Ray Bradbury, who by 1980 had long since entered the literary mainstream, and who also didn’t write much of anything at this point in his career. One can have gripes with who made it in and especially who didn’t (there are only two female authors here, Oates and Lisa Tuttle), but I can readily believe McCauley when he says he tried getting stories from everyone.
It’s also worth mentioning that McCauley didn’t construct Dark Forces with the intention of it being a boundary-pusher for the field of horror (he even explicitly says he didn’t want it to be “as revolutionary” as Dangerous Visions), and this ends up being to its benefit. True, there are a few stories here that may have been transgressive for 1980 (I’m thinking of Theodore Sturgeon’s tale of venereal agony, “Vengeance Is.,” and if I had a nickel for every “pregnant man” story in this book, I would have two nickels), but being extra-gross or what have you was not the name of the game. What might be Dark Forces‘s secret weapon and the biggest reason for its having aged pretty well is how its contents cover pretty close to the whole span of short horror literature up to circa 1980. While we don’t have much dark fantasy a la Robert E. Howard’s weird Conan stories, or the “extreme” horror that would start making the rounds in the proceeding years, there’s a great deal of variety in these 500 pages. We have traditional ghost stories such as Singer’s “The Enemy,” a rendering of the Sweeny Todd narrative with Robert Aickman’s “Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale,” a cautionary tale of one unlucky busybody and a nest of vampiric creatures with Campbell’s “The Brood,” some rural “redneck” horror with Grubb and Manly Wade Wellman’s stories, and so on. There are also a couple non-supernatural tales of terror, as with Oates’s “The Bingo Master” (a personal fave of mine) and Bloch’s “The Night Before Christmas.” There are even a couple stories that fall into a certain genre that’s become rare in recent decades, that being the Christian allegory, with Gene Wolfe’s “The Detective of Dreams” and Russell Kirk’s “The Peculiar Demesne.”
And then there’s The Mist.
A story that “gets away” from the author, as it were, can sometimes be a bloated abomination, but in the case of The Mist we have one of King’s best and most tightly wound stories. Indeed King’s bad habits are pretty much absent here, and the fact that he’s able to reconcile ’50s B-movie monster action with genuine eeriness shows the level of craftmanship he’s capable of when he stops fucking around and focuses on what really matters. While the movie adaptation has a radically different ending (one that many, including King himself, prefer), I do have a soft spot for the novella’s ambiguity and cautious optimism. It was a simple choice for McCauley to put the longest story last, making The Mist the grand finale of Dark Forces, but it’s an example of how sometimes the simplest choice is also the best. Unlike the King collection Skeleton Crew, which sees The Mist as the protracted opening salvo, its position as the closing story of Dark Forces gives one the impression that the whole book had been building up to this moment. It was risky to include such a long story here (it takes up about 1/4 of the book), since if it failed then it would majorly tarnish what is otherwise a good read and leave a sour taste in the reader’s mouth; thankfully The Mist was a success, and has become one of King’s most beloved stories.
Dangerous Visions has, as far as I can tell, never gone out of print, although sadly the same can’t be said for Dark Forces. Anthologies, and especially original anthologies, have a bad tendency to have one or maybe two print runs, then go out of stock until the end of time. The only time Dark Forces has been reprinted this century was a super-expensive limited edition from Lonely Road Books in 2007. Bantam apparently did a paperback printing of Dark Forces in the early ’80s, but otherwise it’s only ever been published in hardcover in the US. It could be that Dangerous Visions was such a monolith at the time of its release, and has gone down as such an important entry in SF history, that its status (despite understandable attempts to knock it down a peg, especially as it continues to show its age more and more) has been more or less secured for the foreseeable future. Dark Forces is arguably a better book and set a better precedent (it served as an inspiration for Clive Barker to get into writing horror, and as we all know, the rest of that is history), but it also now reads, with hindsight, as one of the last big gasps for short fiction as a significant player in the realm of horror. Starting in the ’70s, both novels and movies started taking larger slices out of the pie in terms of what “mattered” for innovation and trends in horror, a field that historically largely hinged on the short story and novella. There would be major practicioners of the short horror story (see Barker, also Thomas Ligotti) to come after 1980, but Dark Forces celebrated (again, with hindsight) the short story as a form with authors who are, by and large, happiest and at their best when writing short stories and novellas.
Some authors see their reputations wither after death, and indeed this is more often than not the case; but there are also authors who have the good fortune to receive a second wind posthumously. Octavia E. Butler was a pretty well-respected writer in her lifetime, but in the years since her untimely death in 2006 she has become one of the select few from the old school to be both widely read and respected among the modern SF readership. This is despite Butler not having written a great deal over the course of her life, going from fairly productive in the ’70s and ’80s to only writing two novels in the ’90s, and then finally just one in the 2000s. She also only wrote little more than half a dozen short stories, just enough to fill a single collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories, which is also padded out with an afterword for each story and a few essays. While Butler wrote very little short fiction, though, she won back-to-back Hugos for it, with “Bloodchild” itself winning her that second Hugo, plus a Nebula. “Bloodchild” is one of the most acclaimed and famous (or infamous) of all “modern” SF stories, being Cronenberg-esque body horror while also being surprisingly melancholy. It is Butler’s “pregnant man” story.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Second Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Best Science Fiction of the Year 14 (ed. Terry Carr), The New Hugo Winners (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), Foundations of Fear (ed. David G. Hartwell), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and of course the Butler collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. Really it’s hard to not have at least one copy of this story on hand if you’re a serious SF reader.
Enhancing Image
I said before that “Bloodchild” is a “pregnant man” story (there were more of those being written back then than you would think), but it’s also a coming-of-age story, about Gan, our narrator, recalling a moment in his life that made him cross the shadow-line from adolescence to adulthood. This is a story about the loss of one’s innocence, which means it’s also about trauma. Gan and the rest of his family are Terran settlers who have come to a planet already host to at least one intelligent race, and now they’re stuck on “the Preserve,” with T’Gatoi, an elder of said intelligent race, being their local symapthizer. The Tlic, a somewhat mammalian but also insectoid (they have more than two arms and lay eggs) race, are the ones in control here. Historically, on Earth, there’s a nasty tendency for the colonizing force to overwhelm and then assimilate the indigenous populace, but this is not always so; in her afterword, Butler explains that she modeled the relations between the Terrans and Tlic off British colonialism in India. The humans here are thoroughly outnumbered and outmatched by their alien hosts, and unlike their real-world counterparts it seems like the Tlic can easily kill or drive out the settlers any day if they wanted to. The two parties thus have reached an agreement wherein the settlers are allowed a swath of land while also serving a specific use for the aliens.
The Tlic are some of the more interesting aliens in SF, in that they meet John W. Campbell’s criteria for an intelligent alien that could think as well as a human but not quite like a human. They’re big, at least as big as adult humans, and live considerably longer, with the nutrients from sterile eggs apparently contributing to slowed aging. They also have no issue with slavery, since they buy and sell Terrans, and back in the day they even split up Terran families for this purpose. (Does this remind you of anything?) They and the Terrans are biologically compatible enough that the latter can serve as hosts for Tlic eggs, which… more on that in a second. In her afterword Butler writes that she had taken inspiration for the Tlic when she was doing research for what eventually became her Xenogenesis trilogy. She looked into the workings of the botfly, which as you might know already is a bug found in the Amazon that lays its eggs in living hosts. The larvae, once ready, break out of the host’s skin, which for humans is a gross but by no means fatal business—unless there’s an infection. The Tlic similarly lay their eggs in living hosts, except it’s much worse here, since whatever has the misfortune of carrying Tlic eggs will die in gory fashion when those eggs hatch. The one gripe I have with how Butler conceived her aliens is that while they’re based on the botfly, it’s not a 1:1 comparison, and there are a few unanswered questions. The botfly is an insect, only yay big, and only lives for a few days, while the Tlic are the size of humans, and live for several decades at a time as opposed to days. How such a species would survive without completely ravaging the ecosystem, I’m not sure.
(Of course, given that humans have been ravaging Earth’s ecosystems for decades, it’s possible that our own species will not survive in the long run, or that much of life on Earth will die before us.)
In a sense the Tlic reflect a certain type of human endeavor, while the human settlers are put in the place of put-upon immigrants or enslaved peoples. Butler looks at the minority of whites living in British India, or indeed South Africa, and wonders what would happen if the tables were turned and the white minority were to be subject to the “colonized” populace’s whims. This is oversimplifying things a great deal, but it does make you wonder how it is that Dutch and British whites could make up not even 10% of South Africa’s population, yet to this day own the vast majority of the land there. Typically a minority demographic is beholden to the whims and prejudices of the majority, hence, despite some progress being made, nearly 30% of the population in the US being beholden to the 72% that’s white. So Gan, despite being part of a colonizing force, is not the one in control. In fact he is next in line in his family for carrying a nice batch of eggs, which makes today’s “delivery” quite the learning experience. Bram Lomas, an adult man, has been made pregnant with Tlic eggs, and the operation to get them out of him before they can kill him is most unpleasant. The delivery, which takes up the middle portion of “Bloodchild,” is undoubtedly the most memorable part, being pretty graphic but also serving a purpose in Gan’s character arc. I’m not gonna quote a whole passage from this section of the story, because I don’t hate you that much, but it’s a lot. It’s also worth mentioning that while a more conventional story might have the delivery as the big climax, Butler makes it so that it’s over and done with by the time we’re in the last third. After all, the delivery is not the point of the whole thing, but rather how the experience sparks an epiphany for Gan.
There Be Spoilers Here
The way this works is that delivering larvae for a human might be fatal if there’s a surrogate willing to take the fall. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a live body to receive the larvae. T’Gatoi gives Gan the thankless job of having to go out and kill one of the livestock, one that must be of suitable size, although he’s never done such a thing before and taking a knife to one of the “achti” (some native animal) would be risky. He opts to take a different kind of risk and gets out the gun that’s been hidden in the family home. Guns were outlawed among the settlers decades ago, but as with real-world countries with strict gun laws, one occasionally does find itself inside. After killing the achti and witnessing the finale of the delivery, Gan is understandably shaken by the whole thing, especially since he’s due to go through the same ordeal himself in the future. The final scene is a confrontation between Gan and T’Gatoi in which the former threatens to kill himself, in order to force his sister to be the one in the family to “give birth.” Ultimately he changes his mind and decides to take up the responsibility, but we’re not sure if his pregnancy has already happened by the time he’s relating this story to us or if it’s still off in the future. It’s a rather abrupt ending, which I’m not sure is exactly a negative criticism, but it kinda took me off-guard to have suddenly reached the end on this rereading. This is a setting you could certainly build a whole novel out of, but Butler is content to keep is contained within a single short story.
A Step Farther Out
Sometimes when I read something for this site, I groan with the realization that I won’t have much to write about, usually when it’s something that’s middle-of-the-road. (Unfortunately there is a lot of middle-of-the-road fiction in the SFF magazines, probably way more even than straight-up bad fiction.) On the one hand, “Bloodchild” is a reread for me, but my memory of it was pretty dim; at the same time I knew going in that there would be quite a bit to talk about, but then this is often the case with Butler. It’s not a personal favorite of mine, because it is, by design, a pretty unpleasant read, but it’s a very well-constructed story. I wish Butler wrote more short fiction, but I’m also not surprised that she didn’t.
(Cover by Len de Lessio. Twilight Zone Magazine, October 1986.)
Who Goes There?
Robert McCammon made his debut in 1978, but didn’t really come to prominence until the latter half of the ’80s, in what was a meteor shower of both novels and short fiction. His longest and most ambitious novel up to that point, 1987’s Swan Song, won him a Stoker, and the next half-decade or so saw a turnout of one novel every year, each one being very well-received. At the beginning, McCammon’s work was decidedly horror, of the Southern Gothic variety (he was born and raised in Alabama), crossed with that rather nostalgic-whimsical style Stephen King became famous for. This mixing of influences arguably reached its climax with Boy’s Life in 1991, which is only nominally horror while at the same time being a mish-mash of several genres. By the time Gone South was published a year later, McCammon had become disillusioned with the horror publishing industry and quit the scene for about a decade, which no doubt hurt his chances at having long-term success, but from his perspective it was a necessary move. “Yellowjacket Summer” is simple, maybe a little too straightforward, but it shows McCammon during a time when he was compulsively writing spooky fiction by the mile. There’s some King in there, undeniably, but also a strong touch of the rural South that’s totally McCammon.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October 1986 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. The only notable reprint is in the McCammon collection Blue World and Other Stories, which is in print.
Enhancing Image
Right away something is kinda off with how McCammon tells this story, and it took me a day’s reflection to figure out exactly what it was: it’s the fact that we have a third-person limited narrator who switches perspectives between characters on a dime and without scene breaks. This is a problem for some people with a novel, but with a short story it’s pretty much a deal-breaker as far as technique goes. We’re in Georgia, in the middle of nowhere at some gas station, with a boy named Toby, who (the introductory blurb basically tells us) has a nasty trick up his sleeve. We soon switch perspectives to a family coming by the gas station where Toby’s at: Carla, the mom, plus her two kids, Joe and Trish. Perspective jumps to Carla, then Joe, then back again, all without a pause in the action, which I found distracting. I cross-examined the TZ printing with how it appears in Blue World, because scene or even chapter breaks might be added or removed for a story between its original printing and elsewhere; but no, I guess this is really how McCammon intended the story to be understood. I know this might come off as overemphasizing a certain flaw, but I do think it seriously gets in the way of what is otherwise a perfectly competent horror yarn about what it’s like to be stuck on the side of the road without cell cervice.
Anyway, what McCammon does do well here is evoke a certain time and place, which I’d already figured from reading Boy’s Life. What Stephen King does for New England, McCammon does for the Bible belt. Consider this description of the gas station: “The ancient-looking gas station, its roof covered with kudzu and its bricks bleached yellow by a hundred summer suns, was a beautiful sight, especially since the Voyager’s tank was getting way too low for comfort.” Ignore that obviously the gas station could not have been around for literally a hundred years, it’s the idea that counts. Now, when the family gets there Joe has to go pretty bad, and when you gotta go you gotta go. Right from the beginning we get the impression that Toby is kind of a bastard, but it’s the scene in the bathroom with Joe that we get our first real taste of Toby’s telepathic power over bees—yellowjackets, specifically. Why he has this power or how he got it, don’t know. This is not a story about the why or the how, and it’s not even a story that’s really “about” anything, other than the visceral horror of being confronted with one mean kid and an endless horde of bees. This is not a fun thing to read about, of course, especially if you’re allergic to bee stings. Thankfully Joe survives the encounter, but unfortunately this is just the beginning of the family’s troubles as they move from the gas station (not being able to get gas there), to a nearby cafe, which happens to be eerily deserted.
McCammon doesn’t strike me as someone who’s into giving incisive social commentary (Consider that Swan Song, a novel clocking in at over 800 pages, has a message that boils down to: “Nuclear war is bad.” Well of course it’s bad, Robert.), but if “Yellowjack Summer” is “about” anything, it’s about the maggot-gnawed husk that is rural America, or what used to be the American frontier. In Georgia we have Atlanta as the beacon of what we think of as civilizatuion, but there are pockets in this state (among others) that seem have been frozen solid decades ago, or gotten quietly left behind by the rest of the country. This story takes place in Capshaw, which is a town, but not much of one. Capshaw is one of many places in America which the country at large has long pushed under the kitchen rug, like some old bread crumbs one can’t be bothered to vacuum up.
Consider this:
The town was quiet except for the distant cawing of a crow. It amazed Carla that such a primitive-looking place should exist just seven or eight miles off the main highway. In an age of interstates and rapid travel, it was easy to forget that little hamlets like this still stood on the back roads—and Carla felt like kicking herself in the butt for getting them into this mess.
I should probably take a moment to bring up an obvious influence for this story, which is Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life.” Had McCammon read the original story as well as seen the Twilight Zone adaptation? Probably. It’s a rock-solid premise: What is a child suddenly got telepathic powers and bent a small town to his will? Toby doesn’t have the world-shattering capabilities of Anthony, but he’s older and more actively sadistic. It becomes clear that one reason why Capshaw is a mostly deserted town is because of Toby, and the few people remaining are too scared to leave. Emma, a rather gaunt woman who works at the cafe, has reached her breaking point by the time Carla arrives, which results in a pretty tense scene. I just wish I cared more. Maybe it’s because of the constantly shifting perspective and the underdeveloped setting, but I found it hard to get invested, even if McCammon has an eye for pacing and this is a smooth read.
There Be Spoilers Here
The good news is that while the yellowjackets do sting a lot, and the chances of getting to real civilization in a van that’s running on E are low, it turns out that evil children are not immune to getting run over with a fucking car. Good to see that child murder wins the day.
A Step Farther Out
Sorry I didn’t have much to say about this one, but sometimes that’s just how it is. I feel like I may have been a bit harsh toward McCammon, but I think it may have to do with his being stronger as a novelist than with short stories. I could be wrong, of course, and it’s possible that “Yellowjacket Summer,” which anyway hasn’t been reprinted much, may just be a relatively weak entry in his vast oeuvre.
I don’t have much to say on today’s author, partly because I’ve not read anything by him until now and partly because there’s not much I can dig up on him. Peter Phillips was an English SF writer, at a time when there weren’t too many of those, and for about a decade he took up writing SF as a side gig, from 1948 to 1958. If he wrote any other fiction, ISFDB makes no mention of it. He also apparently never wrote a novel, which goes some way to explaining his obscurity, since authors who only do short stories (unless you’re Ted Chiang) get kneecapped in the market. There also has never been a collection of Phillips’s short fiction, even though he wrote little enough of it that you could fit it all snuggly into one volume. He quietly stopped writing SF at the end of the ’50s, incidentally when the magazine market was shrinking almost to the point of imploding. He died in 2012. I don’t even know what he looks like. It’s a shame because “Lost Memory,” my first from him, is very good. It’s the kind of hard-knuckled SF with a disturbing tinge of horror that I really like.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. There’s no Phillips collection, but it’s been anthologized a fair number of times, including Gateway to Tomorrow (ed. John Carnell), Second Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (ed. H. L. Gold), Science Fiction Terror Tales (ed. Groff Conklin), The Great SF Stories #14 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (ed. Hank Davis), and We, Robots (ed. Simon Ings).
Enhancing Image
The action takes place on a planet which is hostile to organic life, it seems, although not to hostile to, say, mechanical beings. Indeed a race of mechanical life has grown here, or rather has produced and adapted itself for the situation. Palil is a robot, and a robot, so he’s like a robot reporter. There’s a storytelling method that often made the rounds in old-timey SF, and which Phillips uses effectively here, which is the reporter-protagonist-narrator. Such an archetype is common at this point, because it’s useful, although it doesn’t strictly follow the rules of “good” storytelling. Palil is the narrator, which means he’s our eyes and ears for how this society of robots operates, and his profession makes him doubly good (and convenient) for the task. The robots are presumably all male, since they don’t reproduce sexually (they probably also don’t have any idea of romance) and the characters in-story all refer to each other by male pronouns. Personally I wish Phillips had gone a step further and made the robots genderless, but this is a quibble at most, so I’m happy to live with it. The robots at the museum have encountered a problem in the form of a crashed ship, which to the reader should clearly be understood as an escape pod for some human or humans; but to the robots this is not clear at all. Palil and the others have no concept of human life, and they associate metal (as opposed to flesh) with life that they treat the ship itself as if it were a living thing.
Get this description of the ship:
He was thirty-five feet tall, a gracefully tapering cylinder. Standing at his head, I could find no sign of exterior vision cells, so I assumed he had some kind of vrulling sense. There seemed to be no exterior markings at all, except the long, shallow grooves dented in his skin by scraping to a stop along the hard surface of our planet.
To “vrull” is a sense the robots have which Phillips never explains, and for all we know it’s something unique to them.
The robots have nonsensical names like Chur-chur and Fiff-fiff, which come to think of it sound like sounds for machine parts grinding and whirring, as in the reptition of machinery. The human visitor, for his part, calls himself Entropy, although it’s unclear if that’s the name of the ship or somehow the man’s own name. This ties into the basis of the conflict: the fact that the robots don’t actually know what it is they’re trying to help. There’s a heavy dose of dramatic irony here, as we know perfectly well that Entropy is a human inside the ship, but Palil and the others don’t know what a “mann” is or what it looks like. They don’t even have the word for it in their lexicon. Aside from telling us what senses they have, we also don’t get really any descriptions of what the robots look like, so there’s a good choice they might not look humanoid at all. Howard Muller’s interior art for “Lost Memory” runs with this possibility and depicts what looks like a nightmarish scene, in which a bunch of weirdly designed robots are operating over a ship, as if the ship itself were the patient.
Observe:
(Interior art by Howard Muller.)
While they’re able to establish communications, and both parties just so happen to speak “Inglish,” but this does little to help Entropy, who’s trapped inside his ship and who can barely even comprehend what is on the outside. (By the way, it’s a nice touch on Phillips’s part that Palil spells certain words unconventionally, as if they were either not in the robots’ dictionary or the spelling has simply changed over time. It’s a bit of extra effort that Phillips didn’t need to put in, but he did.) There’s speculation that the robots are the descendants of machines constructed by a fallen human astronaut or crew who had come to this planet many decades ago, that while the human(s) died (perhaps by suicide), their intelligent robots have succeeded them. Society has taken root and ultimately flourished here—only it’s not a human society. Indeed humanity doesn’t seem to have any place here, not because the robots are hostile, but because they’ve completely forgotten what humanity even is, hence the title. This is like a response to many earlier SF stories about man’s relationship with robots, in which the latter have come to either idolize or vilify their creators, but regardless there’s a lasting connection between the two, like a parent with an unruly child; whereas in “Lost Memory,” the connection has long been severed. Robots, at least on this planet, have no need for those who made them.
There Be Spoilers Here
The Fermi paradox is a famous question that’s served as inspiration for many good SF stories, even though it’s relatively recent, not becoming “a thing” until the ’60s. The paradox is basically that there is a high likelihood that Earth is not the only planet even in the Milky Way to contain intelligent life, and yet after all these decades we’ve yet to make contact with said life. The universe seems to be overwhelmingly a cold dead place. The robots of “Lost Memory” are all but confirmed to have been created by man, but they’re still an intelligent race not native to Earth, and the story itself plays out like a first-contact narrative. But, while he has made contact with the descendants of a group of intelligent machines, Entropy doesn’t live long enough to appreciate this at all. The “doctor” who breaks open the ship inadvertently kills Entropy, and even if he hadn’t done so directly, there’s very little chance of the human surviving long afterward anyway. This is a case where the reader can easily anticipate the ending, and yet despite the ending being practically a foregone conclusion, the inevitability of it only raises one’s anxiety as we get closer to the end.
A Step Farther Out
I mentioned Ted Chiang earlier as kind of a joke, but “Lost Memory” does unintentionally read like both a distant precursor and counterpart to Chiang’s “Exhalation.” Both have to do with mechanical life overcoming (or failing to overcome) entropy, but either way a price must be paid. Humans are totally absent in “Exhalation,” but in “Lost Memory” the robots meet a member of the race that created them—much to the human’s detriment. The ending is perhaps predictable, to the point of being inevitable, but this is a rare case where the ending being easily foreseen does nothing to ease mind’s mind at the impending horror of it. Phillips is pretty obscure and didn’t write much, but I’ll be keeping an eye on him.
(Cover by Malcolm Smith. Other Worlds, March 1950.)
Who Goes There?
We’re keeping things short and sweet today, with a rather self-explanatory story by an author who has little need for an introduction. Ray Bradbury is one of those rare people who’s a canonical SF writer as well as having a place in the mainstream American literary canon; and yet this was by no means inevitable for Bradbury, who started out as a fan at the tail end of the ’30s, writing for niche publications. He spent the next few years honing his craft, until he began getting his first really good short fiction published in 1943, with the next decade being very productive. Bradbury advised young writers to try for one short story a week, a rule he himself seemed to abide for a while, since by by the time he was 27 he’d written more than enough short fiction for his first collection, Dark Carnival. Despite being known best for his science fiction, much of Bradbury’s early work has a horror bent to it, enough that he felt the need to update his first collection with a revised table of contents and a new title: The October Country. “Punishment Without Crime” was not printed in one of the famous collections, but it combines SF with horror and crime fiction in a way that encapsulates some of Bradbury’s interests—if also his shortcomings. It’s also the last in a trilogy of stories about Marionettes, Inc., a company that produces lifelike telepathic androids. Weirdly enough these were all published in different magazines, but each one seems to work as a standalone.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1950 issue of Other Worlds Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Science Fiction Terror Tales (ed. Groff Conklin) and the Bradbury collections Long After Midnight, The Stories of Ray Bradbury, and Killer, Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury.
Enhancing Image
It’s America in the 2000s, and middle-aged middle-class husbands still have not considered that it might be better to divorce one’s wife on grounds of adultery than to kill her. George Hill, our protagonist, at least apparently doesn’t consider divorce to be an option, since lately he’s been thinking about murdering Katherine, his wife. Katherine (or Katie) is about twenty years George’s junior, while George is about fifty, which might explain why Katie’s been having an affair with Leonard Phelps, who is, if nothing else, closer to her age. “Better men than he had taken young wives only to have them dissolve away in their hands like sugar crystals under water.” But still, George is too mannerly, and maybe too decent, to kill his wife; so instead he’s come to the next best thing, which is Marionettes, Inc. Sure, to have a doll, a simulacrum of Katie, and to “kill” this doll, is in itself illegal, but it beats doing the real thing, at least morally. That much should go without saying. What George doesn’t realize, though, is that confronting a simulacrum of his wife may prove just as deadly to him as if he had tried murdering the real Katie. “The violent unviolence. The death without death. The murder without murdering.” And so there might also be, ironically for George, punishment without crime.
Sorry, I was trying out my Rod Serling voice.
This is very much a Twilight Zone episode in spirit, never mind it was published almost a whole decade before TZ‘s premiere. Bradbury consciously fell in with the O. Henry school of short-story writing, which is to say his stories are often structures as akin to jokes, with a setup and a punchline. The punchline is often a cruel one. A contemporary of Bradbury’s, John Collier, wrote along the same lines, to the point where “Punishment Without Crime” could be taken as Bradbury paying homage to Collier, what with the strange preoccupation with husbands conspiring to murder their wives. Bradbury had very likely read some Collier stories by 1949, so it’s possible. (There’s a misoginistic streak running through some of Bradbury’s work that I don’t see people bring up, really.) Anyway, George gets what he asks for, but he also gets something a bit extra in the bargain, what with the doll, being telepathic and sentient to some degree, practically taunting him. This stretch of the story, in which George must reckon with his conflicting feelings about his wife via the fake Katie, is easily my favorite, even if it also quotes liberally from what I’m pretty sure is the Song of Songs. Then again, having George’s sexual insecurity be not only overt but the focal point of “Punishment Without Crime” would’ve been all but unthinkable for a genre SF story just five years earlier. You could get away with something like this in Weird Tales, but the SF magazines of the ’40s were relatively chaste (incidentally Weird Tales was where Bradbury really cut his teeth). There were also the crime fiction magazines, and more importantly the “slicks” (which Bradbury frequented), but “Punishment Without Crime” might’ve been too pulpy and at the same time SFnal for the latter.
If Bradbury has a drawback, it’s that he seems to know only one woman: his wife. The gender politics here are rather off. The fake Katie is a femme fatale, of sorts, while the real Katie is implied to not be any better. Without giving away anything too specific in this section, the ending paints the real Katie as a ruthless schemer who really can’t be bothered if George lives or dies. Is this some weird future where you’re just not allowed to get divorced? Would it really be easier to kill your spouse than the other option? There will be legal trouble either way. Obviously I’m putting too much thought into it. This is a story that’ll take you maybe twenty minutes to read, and it’s written in that fast-paced breezy style Bradbury often used, the result being that even though I have issues with it, at least it goes down smoothly. If you’re a Bradbury fan then you’ll probably enjoy it.
There Be Spoilers Here
When George finally does “kill” the fake Katie, it works a little too well and is a little too convincing, with the Marionettes, Inc. people having even installed fake blood. Maybe it would be enough for George to just have a screw loose and to slip into psychosis over having wanted to murder his wife, but unfortunately for him his creator is Ray Bradbury. George and other clients of Marionettes, Inc. are promptly arrested afterward on charges of murder, even though nobody had actually been killed. As George’s lawyer explains it, it’s a damn shame that the government’s been cracking down on androids as of late, since had this all happened ten years earlier or even ten years later, he’d probably get off fine. As it is, George is sentenced to death, and while we’re not told how much time passes, it can’t be long before he’s on death row, waiting for the electric chair. He’s surprisingly calm about all this, since he’s had a psychotic break, but in a final ironic twist he sees the real Katie outside his cell one day and slips back into lucidity, having enough time to realize that he’s been massively screwed over by the system. It doesn’t matter. Katie’s off with her young boyfriend. Like I said, Bradbury tended to follow the O. Henry line of storytelling.
A Step Farther Out
For someone who’s read quite a bit of Bradbury over the years, I’ve become a bit more ambivalent towards him as I’ve gotten older. Not that he was ever in my top five SF authors or anything, but there’s something too whimsical and childish (in a bad way) about Bradbury’s writing that also reminds me of the worst of, say, Connie Willis, or Stephen King. Hokey? Saccharine? Whatever you wanna call it. Willfully immature. “Punishment Without Crime” is a curious combination of a few genres, on top of being clearly a moral allegory, but it doesn’t quite take advantage of any of its inspirations. It’s also too short and fast-paced to feel like something I should take seriously. I can believe it’s something Bradbury wrote in a week or less, then shuffled off to what was a second-rate magazine. Nowadays I like Bradbury most when he leans all the way into horror, hence my favorite stories tend to be in The October Country and The Illustrated Man.
Samantha Mills made her debut in 2012, although she didn’t start getting published regularly until 2018. As she says in an interview for (the sadly now-defunct) Fantasy Magazine, which you can read here:
Over the next few years, my attempts at novels improved rapidly, but short stories remained a mystery until 2017. I can’t fully describe what happened, but after a lot of reading it finally clicked, and I produced a few stories that worked, and I finally began submitting again.
By this point Mills had been out of college for about a decade, so if you’re at such-and-such an age and worried it might be too late to try your hand at getting published professionally, it probably isn’t.
I had said in my review forecast at the beginning of the month that Mills had probably written “Rabbit Test” prior to a certain infamous SCOTUS decision getting leaked in May 2022, but this turned out to be wrong. Mills, like any writer, had the idea of the real-life use of female rabbits for human pregnancy tests tumbling around in the back of her mind for years, but it took the catastrophic Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision for her to think of a story to go with it. She wrote “Rabbit Test” in the summer of 2022 and it quickly got picked up by Uncanny Magazine, who published it just a few months later. Turnarounds for story submissions are usually not this quick, but then “Rabbit Test” is, if nothing else, a deeply timely story, and Mills’s gambit paid off. “Rabbit Test” is only the third story ever to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and it placed first in the Locus poll.
I remember when awards season was underway and there was a lot of very good word-of-mouth regarding “Rabbit Test” online, which no doubt contributed to it sweeping. It’s a story that spoke incisively of “the moment” (although “the moment” is now three years behind us) in American politics, that worked to get a reaction out of left-liberal readers, and so it did. But, again, that was three years ago. How does it hold as a story, some time after its own “moment” has passed?
Placing Coordinates
First published in the November-December 2022 issue of Uncanny Magazine, which you can read here. It’s since been reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (ed. R. F. Kuang) and Nebula Awards Showcase 58 (ed. Stephen Kotowych).
Enhancing Image
The year is 2091, and Grace, a normal girl about to turn 18, has a big problem in the form of an unwanted pregnancy. She had sex with her maybe-boyfriend before he goes away and now her rabbit test (not a test actually involving a rabbit) has come up positive. This would be bad enough on its own, but the America of 2091 is (at least in some ways) even worse off than today, with women’s menstrual cycles being tracked by an app, courtesy of Rabbit Test LMC. Of course, parents can watch over their underage daughters’ cycles like hawks, and this is all in the aftermath of a nationwide ban on abortion. Grace’s only real hope is to go to her friend Sal to mess with the app, causing a “blackout” long enough for Grace to procure some illicit abortion pills from “one of those old ladies who sells pill packs out of their closets, hoarded up from before the ban.” If she can get this thing taken care of without her Jesus-freak mom finding out then all will be well, more or less. Of course, things don’t go that way.
Grace’s story only takes up about half of “Rabbit Test,” with the other half being a mix of real facts, narratives, and fictionalized vignettes that feed into the greater narrative about reproductive rights. To give Mills credit in a couple ways, she evidently spent much of her time (about a month, by her estimates) on the story by doing research, taking a crash course in the history of abortion, forcing miscarriages, pregnancy tests, and so on. That this is all readable while also being crammed into just over 7,000 words is in itself an achievement, although it’s about one step away from simply copy-pasting passages from actual research papers into your SF short story. What makes this all more impressive is that Mills is taking an intersectional feminist approach, plus a somewhat Marx-inspired understanding of historical forces, to make connections you probably wouldn’t make on your own; indeed these sections, kept away from the Grace narrative, are the closest “Rabbit Test” comes to letting the reader think for themself. We get, in a surprisingly short number of words, a brief history of methods for testing pregnancy, going from mice and rabbits to frogs, of women across different cultures and time periods using at-home methods of testing for pregnancy and (if the desire be there) forcing a miscarriage. It becomes clear that the issue of women’s reproductive rights is one that connects race and class conflict, as well as misogyny, perhaps the oldest of mankind’s evils against itself. This sounds like a lot, because it is.
Meanwhile, Grace comes close to getting what she needs through a trans man named Ambrose (“Women aren’t the only people worried about their uteruses, and Ambrose saw the writing on the wall long before the 2084 ban passed.”), but it’s too late. Sal has ratted her out, apparently being unable to keep her mouth shut, and to say Grace’s mom is unhappy about all this would be an understatement. Grace is gonna have the baby, whether she wants to or not. I would feel more about this if we only barely got to know Grace as a person, and if Amelia, Grace’s mom, wasn’t a caricature of the sort you’d find in Stephen King’s writing.
Get this:
Amelia is marching because she fears being outnumbered. She’s marching because she believes it’s her duty to save babies and place them in homes with good Christian values, because the scientific establishment is out of control, a cabal of demons on Earth locking an entire generation out of salvation.
On the one hand yes, there are people like Amelia in America today—at least several million, going by polls. This doesn’t make her any less of a cartoon character. Then again, nobody is allowed much development or interiority in “Rabbit Test,” since this isn’t that kind of story and goddamnit, we only have 7,000 words and change to get through everything. It’s effective shorthand on Mills’s part for letting us know Grace’s mom is a raving lunatic and that we should be worried about Grace’s safety, but it’s just that. Maybe the biggest message take from all this is that so many people, especially queer people (hey, at least Grace is straight and cis, as far as we know), would be better off if they moved out of their parents’ house as soon as possible. I’m being serious here, as someone whose mental health improved exponentially (putting the bouts of depression I still get aside) once I got a place of my own. Unfortunately, Grace don’t got the means.
When I criticize Mills, just know that a part of me does feel bad, for at least two reasons: the first is that I can respect her rather far-left interpretation of history, as it’s one I more or less agree with. Then again, you might say I’m biased for that reason, and for my part I honestly can’t imagine any “pro-life” person reading “Rabbit Chest” and being convinced by Mills’s argument. The second reason is that if I wanted a story with this message to be more to my liking, I would basically be demanding a different kind of story almost altogether, one that leans much more into a show-don’t-tell approach. This is clearly not what Mills had in mind. So, I can take “Rabbit Test” for what it is or I can sit back and think about a quite different story it could’ve been, one which would’ve met my own specific tastes. Which is more fair? But obviously, even if I were to try to be fair all the way, I don’t see myself ever rereading “Rabbit Test” from start to finish. I consider a great short story to be one that the reader can go back to again and again over a span of years, and I’m not sure if Mills intended “Rabbit Test” to be read more than once. Despite the amount of research and talking points, and admittedly some good lines in there, there’s not much reason to go back to it. That’s not what I think of as being a top-tier story.
There Be Spoilers Here
Grace gives birth to a daughter, named Olivia, and eventually the two move out from under Amelia’s scornful gaze and get an apartment of their own. Despite having been desperate to abort her years earlier, Grace has come to love and care for her daughter, despite the two of them living on meager means. Unfortunately, almost as if like clockwork, disaster strikes again. It’s strongly implied that the teenaged Olivia got drugged and raped at a party, and while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does tend to rhyme. So it goes. The two are able to force a miscarriage, but it comes at a terrible price, as Grace is charged with murder and spends a couple decades in prison—for killing what would’ve been almost indistinguishable from a cat fetus. Finally, the year is 2119, and congress is close to reversing the nationwide abortion ban. We’re told that in the intervening years gay marriage had been banned nationwide, only for that decision to later be reversed. Presumably the same thing will happen with the abortion ban. Hopefully.
The idea is that history works in cycles. Rights that were given at one time can just as easily be taken away in another, and also the other way around. For about half a century we in the US had the nationwide right to abortion, thanks to Roe v. Wade, but now we live in a post-Roe v. Wade world. As Mills says at the end, “it is never over.” Patriarchy and the subjugation of women is such an old human evil that it’s in the Bible, predating capitalism by centuries. Mills ultimately argues that women’s liberation is the omni-cause of human rights, and has been for a long time; but like any good intersectional feminist she knows the fight for women’s liberation ties into capitalism, racism, colonialism, and a few other -isms I’m not mentioning at the moment.
A Step Farther Out
I had read this story a couple days ago, and took some time to sit on it. I feel rather conflicted, because Mills succeeded in writing the kind of story she wanted to write; it’s just that I had wished “Rabbit Test” would be something other than what it is, which I understand is unfair. When I heard all these things about “Rabbit Test” I got the hunch it would be a didactic treatise on abortion rights, and it is indeed that. If anything it’s even more in-your-face than I was expecting. I agree with every point Mills makes here, so I feel like I’m at liberty to say this kind of story-as-treatise method doesn’t work for me. I could be wrong, but I don’t think “Rabbit Test” will be read and enjoyed thirty years from now in the way of, say, Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire” or even Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”—the latter also being on the didactic side and seemingly made in a lab to be forced on English students, but still enjoyable. Even Le Guin, when she’s trying to make a point, leaves enough room for the reader to think on it, so that they feel like they’re collaborating with the author.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 