Remembrance of Things Past and Future

Short Story Review: “The Jaunt” by Stephen King

February 24th, 2023
(Cover by Darrelyn Wood. TZM, June 1981.)

Who Goes There?

Do I really need to introduce you to Stephen King? Nah, I don’t. So this is not so much a cursory look at King’s life and works as my own personal experience with him, because I have to admit, I was slow to read King at all. A lot of people have probably read him in high school, but I didn’t read a single word of his until I was in college; that’s not a gloat or anything, that’s just the reality of the situation. Had I read King earlier I probably would’ve been more entranced. My first exposure to King was “The Gunslinger,” the short story that later became part of the novel of the same name, the first in his Dark Tower series. I remember basically nothing about it. But later I read Different Seasons, his novella collection (although I will die on the hill of arguing Apt Pupil and The Body are full novels), which was sort of a mixed experience but mostly positive, although honestly The Shawshank Redemption improves on its source material in several ways.

Then last year I read ‘Salem’s Lot, his second novel, and I was sort of impressed; I love the first half and while the second half is oddly not nearly as scary (it loses its foreboding tone once the vampire-hunting gets underway), I liked that too. Good novel, even if it proved to be ground zero for so many of King’s… well, let’s call them quirks. King has written a lot. Like a fuckton. Like it’s intimidating to see just how many novels he’s written, although his list of short works is more manageable. Point being, King inevitably repeats himself; he has a list of go-to tropes and plot devices, and probably even turns of phrase that he can resort to over and over. I don’t really blame him: Philip K. Dick had a set of formulae too. But it’s also easy to poke fun at King’s tendency to, for example, set a given story in his home state of Maine—although today’s tale is an exception.

Despite being labeled a horror author, King has at least dabbled in pretty much every genre you can think of, including some good ol’ science fiction. “The Jaunt” is one of his more famous short stories (admittedly his short stories are not nearly as famous as his novels and novellas), and it’s the most pronounced example of him combining SF with horror in that both genres about equally play off each other here.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine, which is on the Archive. Because this is a King story from his prime era it’s very easy to find in print. The obvious choice is Skeleton Crew, which contains, among other things, The Mist. (I don’t know why I got The Mist as a standalone paperback, that was a waste of money. Actually several of King’s novellas have been resold as standalone paperbacks despite being only marginally cheaper than the collections they appear in.) The weird thing about “The Jaunt” is that it hasn’t been anthologized much; in four decades it’s been anthologized in English only a couple times.

Enhancing Image

Mark is taking his family for a business trip; in the old days they would’ve taken a ship to Mars, but with the Jaunt they can fall asleep and wake up at their destination in what feels like seconds. The Jaunt (with a capital J) is a revolutionary method of transportation that has made moving things and people between planets as easy as possible. Mark has Jaunted before but his wife Marilys and son Ricky and daughter Patty have not before. As they’re waiting to get a hit of sleeping gas (you have to be rendered unconscious before Jaunting), Mark passes the time and indulges his kids’ curiosity by telling them the story of how teleportation was invented; the kids would know little bits and pieces already, but Mark decides to tell them enough of the story, if not all the grisly details.

A few things to note before we get into that origin story…

King would’ve written “The Jaunt” circa 1980, or maybe earlier, and indeed this could not have been written any later than the early ’80s with how much it explicitly references OPEC and the oil crisis in the ’70s—a rather specific period in American history that the characters in this far-future setting treat like it was a recent and life-changing happening. I find this funny, because while the oil crisis no doubt impacted millions of Americans who were there to live through it, even people born, say, 1990 and later would have basically no context or sense of attachment with that period. The story shows its age by using what was then a recent time in history and overestimating how people in the future would relate to said time. Jaunting would be considered a monumental breakthrough in transportation regardless of when it was invented, but while King’s decision to date the story may seem superfluous, it does what most if not all science fiction sets out to do: not to predict the future but to comment on the present.

Also, if you’re a seasoned SF reader then you probably thought of jaunting (lower case l) as depicted in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which was by no means the first use of teleportation in SF but definitely had one of the most creative and influential uses. I figured, even before starting to read this one, that “The Jaunt” was harking to Bester’s novel, and that it would subvert our expectations about the mechanics of teleportation in some way since it’s clearly a horror story. Rather than let the reference go unspoken, though, King goes out of his way to let you know that he too manages to fit reading science fiction into his no doubt busy schedule. It’s one of those hat tips to fandom that makes me roll my eyes, but it also makes me wonder if “The Jaunt” would’ve gotten a Hugo nomination had it been published in an SF (and not horror) magazine.

Get this:

“Sometimes in college chemistry and physics they call it the Carew Process, but it’s really teleportation, and it was Carew himself—if you can believe the stories—who named it ‘the Jaunt.’ He was a science fiction reader, and there’s a story by a man named Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination it’s called, and this fellow Bester made up the word ‘jaunte’ for teleportation in it. Except in his book, you could Jaunt just by thinking about it, and we can’t really do that.”

Anyway, about Victor Carew. The Carew story is when “The Jaunt” starts to grab my attention and as far as I’m concerned it’s the good SF-horror story that, like one of those Russian toys, is nestled inside a less scary and more cliched story. Carew was a scientist who struggled to retain autonomy while under government surveillance, using a barn as a makeshift laboratory and, like Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Fly, using this space to work on teleportation. The good news is that he finds that inanimate objects can be teleported from Portal A to Portal B with no issues; this alone would’ve revolutionized transportation, being able to move cargo between whole planets without a human driver. But of course this is sort of a cautionary tale and Carew does something that sounds reasonable but which will prove to have very mixed results: teleporting living things.

Having experimented on himself partly (he “loses” two fingers), Carew wonders if something can go through Portal A wholesale and come out of Portal B unscathed. Now, rather than experiment on people, Carew does the sane thing and tests Jaunting on animals—more specifically white mice. The mice (King erroneously calls them rats at one point) unfortunattely don’t fare well with teleportation: they come out the other end seemingly unharmed, but every one them dies soon after Jaunting. What’s more interesting is that if a mouse is put through Portal A tail-first and only partly subjected to the Jaunt, such that their head is still on the side of Portal A, they’re fine; if they’re put in head-first, however, with their head at Portal B and their tail at Portal A, they die even if they’re not completely teleported. Clearly then the mice dying has something to do with vision—what they’re seeing at that point between Portal A and B.

“What the hell is in there?” Carew wonders. Indeed.

I was wondering if King would go in a body horror or cosmic horror direction with this, and turns out it’s a bit of both. The body horror stems from how teleportation, if done gradually, reveals the insides of anything being teleported, such that we’re able to see the organs of the mice as they’re put slowly through the portal. The effect is uncanny and King, admirably, doesn’t dwell on it for too long, since he has another trick up his sleeve—that being the cosmic aspect. You see, teleportation takes a tiney fraction of a second, but during that incredibly brief time the subjective time it takes to Jaunt is enormous, although Carew does not realize this immediately. After all, the mice, aside from acting dazed when they come out the other end, don’t show any physical signs of being on the brink of death. What, then, could be killing them? Doesn’t matter, at least to the government, because Jaunting works and it’s about to change everything.

The results of the announcement of the Jaunt—of working teleportation—on October 19th, 1988, was a hammerstroke of worldwide excitement and economic upheaval. On the world money markets, the battered old American dollar suddenly skyrocketed through the roof. People who had bought gold at eight hundred and six dollars an ounce suddenly found that a pound of gold would bring something less than twelve hundred dollars. In the year between the announcement of the Jaunt and the first working Jaunt-Stations in New York and L.A., the stock market climbed a little over two hundred points. The price of oil dropped only seventy cents a barrel, but by 1994, with Jaunt-Stations crisscrossing the U.S. at the pressure-points of seventy major cities, OPEC solidarity had been cracked, and the price of oil began to tumble. By 1998, with Stations in most free world cities and goods routinely Jaunted between Toyko [sic] and Paris, Paris and London, London and New York, New York and Berlin, oil had dropped to fourteen dollars a barrel. By 2006, when people at last began to use the Jaunt on a regular basis, the stock market had leveled off seven hundred points above its 1987 levels and oil was selling for six dollars a barrel.

By 2006, oil had become what it had been in 1906: a toy.

Again I’m amused that King made the invention of teleportation so close to what would’ve then been the present day. What is he trying to say here? Genuine question, although I have to think it has to do with what was then (and still is, really) a mad search not only for alternative energy sources but to make those sources commercially viable. Sadly he doesn’t go deeper into the socio-economic implications of Jaunting (I imagine truckers would be mad about being out of a job), but he does enough that we’re given a juicy slice of how society in the future could be changed radically. And hell, even if you consider the negatives, the environmental consequences (there don’t seem to be any drawbacks in this regard) alone would make Jaunting a godsend not just for most people but for life on Earth generally.

A shame about those who Jaunt while still awake…

There Be Spoilers Here

Turns out Jaunting does have a physical effect on people, and there’s a reason why Carew is not able to see that by testing on the white mice. Apparently Jaunting while awake (although not when asleep, weird) turns your hair white (assuming it’s not already) while also aging you massively—physically, with the hair, but especially mentally. I’m embarrassed actually that it took until mere minutes prior to my writing this that the reason why Carew doesn’t see a physical change in the mice is that their coats are already white. In fairness the mice having their coats unchanged is a detail that’s unusually subtle by King’s standards, and it makes me think about how much better “The Jaunt” could’ve been had he put more of that storytelling discipline into action. I know I may sound unfairly harsh to the most popular horror author of all time, but King really does have moments where he’s able to push himself to the realm of true artistry, something higher than workmanlike technique; sometimes he really doesn’t, though.

(My favorite King short story is still “The Reach,” which is an unusually low-key outing for him, though that paid off with a World Fantasy Award win. It’s refined and effective as both a ghost story and simply as a work of fiction, and if you want prime King then I’d say that’s an example.)

So now we’re at the end. The time has come for Mark and his family to Jaunt to Mars; they get the gas and at first everything seems fine when they arrive at the other end. The only thing is that Ricky, being a dumbass, intentionally held his breath during the gassing and stayed conscious during the Jaunt, with predictably horrific results. Like with other people who supposedly stayed conscious during the Jaunt he comes out the other end with his hair snow-white, only this time, rather than being dazed like the mice, Ricky is laughing mad to the point of clawing his own eyes out while he cackles. Presumably Ricky will not live long, and to say this trip for the family proves traumatic would be an understatement.

A few questions:
1. Since the Jaunt has been proved to be potentially deadly, and in a dramatic fashion at that, you’d think there’d be more safety measures. I get that if “The Cold Equations” can work in spite of how implausible its situation is then so can “The Jaunt,” but with the former I get the feeling (well actually we know this from correspondence between John W. Campbell and author Tom Godwin) that the decision to forego measures that would’ve saved the girl in that story was deliberate, whereas in “The Jaunt” it feels like a way for King to sneak in a scary ending.
2. If all it takes for someone to stay awake during the Jaunt is so just hold their breath when being gassed, shouldn’t there be more cases like this? We’re given the impression that surely no one would be stupid enough to do that, given that Ricky is shown to be only a mildly stupid child, shouldn’t there be more cases of children dying from the Jaunt? I know that sounds morbid, but surely it’s no more morbid than quite a bit of what King’s written over the years.
3. Come to think of it, how come the attendants didn’t notice that Ricky wasn’t inhailing the gas? Couldn’t they tell? Shouldn’t there be some kind of backup measure to make sure that someone is unconscious before Jaunting? You have a two-step authentication process to check your damn bank statements on your phone, there should probably be something extra here. Not that the story as a whole doesn’t work, but the ending specifically would not be allowed to happen if even rudimentary safety measures were in place.
4. Children should probably not be allowed to Jaunt, right? It sounds like too much of a safety hazard. I know the obvious counter-argument would be that children are allowed in cars all the time and cars kill far more people in a year than sharks and airplane accidents combined (by like a lot), but there are also measures in place to try to minimize car fatalities. Granted, when “The Jaunt” was being written cars were far less safe than now and some people even today are reckless enough to cheat around using seatbelts. Still, the red tape for a Jaunting accident involving a child would be tremendous.
Anyway, even if I ignored the leap in logic, it’s too over the top for me to find scary. Ricky, a character whom we’ve gotten to know very little up to this point, does something monumentally stupid so that we can get a shocker ending. You could argue that it justifies the frame narrative, since otherwise the story just ends once Mark is done telling the story within the story, but I’d retort by saying that at least if the frame narrative is gonna be here at all then an ambiguous and moody ending would do better. We already had some body horror earlier that was creative and restrained enough that King left a good deal to the imagination. Personally I think we could’ve done without the frame narrative entirely; it’s not like Mark and his family are more compelling voices than Carew, and I was far more gripped by the substance of the story that’s being framed than how it was being framed.

A Step Farther Out

Kinda mixed on this one. There’s a pretty interesting SF-horror narrative nestled within a rather pointless frame narrative that not only verges on cornball but has a twist so obvious that it can be seen from orbit. It wouldn’t take too much to reframe the narrative in a documentary-like fashion, like Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dunwich Horror,” wherein we’re like witnesses to a series of realistic but supernatural events. Unfortunately that requires a degree of restraint that King fails to practice here, and the result is ultimately too overblown for me to be genuinely spooked by. On the bright side, it’s memorable! King is aware that readers, even in 1981, are well aware of teleportation as a genre chestnut and tries admirably to subvert our expectations regarding this technology. That he’s able to conjure something menacing out of tech that, realistically, would change society for the better, is a sign of talent. It’s just a shame that the execution renders the story not all that scary, and also maybe too self-conscious.

See you next time.

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Serial Review: Needle by Hal Clement (Part 1/2)

February 20th, 2023

(Cover by Paul Orban. Astounding, May 1949.)

Who Goes There?

There’s been an ongoing debate over the decades as to hard SF’s place in the context of SF literature, and even the basic question of what hard SF is. Now, I’m just a lay reader; I don’t have a degree in the hard sciences. I took a chemistry course in college that I’ve basically forgotten everything about. I do, however, feel confident in giving a succinct and easily understandable definition for hard SF that will hopefully mellow the conversation: hard SF is Hal Clement. Now remembered as a writer (he also did painting on the side), Clement was a trained astronomer and chemist who seemed eager (to the point of obsession) to convey his love for the wonders of the natural world to the rest of us mortals. Most famously with Mission of Gravity but palpable in so much of his work is this sense of a clockmaker or a sculptor who never tires of the delicate mechanics of his craft. Clement was what we might call a planet builder, and he was one of the best.

Clement’s career is also one of the longest of any SF author, although except for a bright period in the ’50s he was never too prolific. He debuted with the short story “Proof” in 1942, written when he was still a teenager, and his final SF work, the novel Noise, was published in 2003—the year of his death. From beginning to end he kept the faith, demonstrating that it was possible to extract artistry from the intricacies of physics and chemistry. More than any other figure (despite some being more popular), Hal Clement is the grand architect of hard SF. Our understanding of hard SF as fiction which puts roughly equal emphasis on both science and fiction goes back to Clement. To crib a line from James Nicholl, in his Tor.com article on the Ballantine slash Del Rey Best Of series, “Current exoplanet research suggests that we are living in a Hal Clement universe.”

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 was published in the May 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. A word of warning: a scanning error on a specific page ~~it’s page 26~~ renders a handful of words therein illegible, which left me feeling cheated slightly. Apparently this same scan is on Luminist, which means that, as far as I know, there’s no scan of this issue available online that does not have this problem. Anyway, from what I understand the serial version of Needle is arguably novella-length; Clement would expand Needle for book publication, although I can’t imagine he could’ve added that much material. Used paperback editions are not hard to find, although if you want something in print and a little fancy then go with The Essential Hal Clement Volume 1: Trio for Slide Rule & Typewriter, which collects Needle along with Iceworld and Close to Critical.

Enhancing Image

We start with a spaceship chase that quickly becomes earthbound. An alien police officer known only as the Hunter is after a fugitive, a member of his own species, when both ships crash land on Earth—and on a rather specific part of Earth, too. The Hunter is a blob-like semi-liquid alien that’s also, technically, a parasite, albeit a symbiotic one; the Hunter survives the crash but his alien host does not. Upon leaving the ship the Hunter finds himself in our ocean, not too far from shore, which is where we get the inspiration for both the cover and the first interior, involving an unlucky hammerhead shark that mistakes the Hunter for food. The Hunter at first tries taking on the shark as a host, finding a) the shark is a predator who is trying (unsuccessfully) to devour him, and b) the shark is of markedly low intelligence (apparently the symbiotes are used to taking sentient beings as hosts), the Hunter thinks it best and only fair game to leave the shark for dead once he’s able to get it to beach itself.

A few things immediately stood out to me. The narrative is third-person and sort of omniscient, but also totally from the Hunter’s perspective. The decision to make the hero of the story both an alien and non-humanoid must’ve also been a rare decision in those days, especially in the pages of Astounding; but don’t worry, there’s still some human chauvinism thrown in once the Hunter acquires his human host—more on that later. Another is the tropical setting. I don’t think we’re ever told specifically where this is set, but I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be Hawaii, in the late ’40s when Hawaii was a US territory but not a state yet. This would also be taking place presumably a few years after the end of World War II, although the war never gets brought up directly. Finally, as is often noted when people review this novel, this is, if not the first then one of the first attempts to wed science fiction with a good old-fashioned mystery.

A common criticism (or at least it used to be a criticism) of SF-mystery is that the author can pull anything out of their ass in order for the mystery to be solved conveniently, not to mention that in a futuristic setting there would be a wide arsenal of tools the protagonist can use to solve the mystery. At least with for the latter Needle presents no such issue; while the Hunter is an alien, he has to make due with what was then modern Earth technology and the cooperation of a human who, on top of being a teenager, might not be keen on letting an alien slime ball inhabit his body. The Hunter and the fugitive are also on about the same playing field since they’re both symbiotes who both crashed in the same area, and both ideally want a host of high intelligence and mobility, in which case humans would be the only good option. Of course, finding someone who could be inhabiting any given body would be like finding a needle in a haystack (hence the title, very clever), and even with the small island setting the Hunter has potentially dozens if not hundreds of people who could be hosts for the fugitive.

You may be thinking to yourself: “Wait, an alien policeman goes after another alien that has crash landed in Hawaii, a place conveniently surrounded by water, and the latter alien is able to blend in with the local population?” No, this is not Lilo & Stitch, this is something totally different.

Now, about that human host. The Hunter comes upon a bunch of teen boys hanging out on the beach, and one of them, Robert Kinnaird (Bob for short), is taking a nap while the others are distracted. What happens next is… interesting. The Hunter makes it clear both to us and later to Bob that a symbiote much prefers to take another’s body with the host’s knowledge and consent (there are indeed benefits to having a four-pound blob inside you, as we’ll see), but since the Hunter knows nothing of the local language and has enough common sense to figure that the boy would probably not just let him come inside (there should be a better way to phrase this), he takes the sneaky option. I don’t think Clement intended this, but the body horror potential of this whole ordeal is quite big. Take the following passage, in which the Hunter creeps into Bob’s body unbeknownst to the latter:

The boy was sound asleep, and remained so. The alien organism flowed smoothly along the bones and tendons in his foot and ankle; up within the muscle sheaths of calf and thigh; switched to the outer wall of the femoral artery and the tubelets within the structure of the thigh bones; around points, and along still other blood vessels. It filtered through the peritoneum without causing the least damage; and slowly the whole four pounds of matter accumulated in the abdominal cavity, not only without harming the boy in the least but without even disturbing his slumber. And there, for a few minutes, the Hunter rested.

Ech. This was meant for teenagers? Right, Needle is technically a juvenile, although as is often the case with juvenile SF from this period (see also Robert Heinlein’s juveniles) I struggle to believe it was aimed at such a young readership. Not that the prose is hard to get through. Clement’s style is… well, it’s not poetic; actually it’s the opposite of poetic. When people say they have a hard time getting into hard SF, especially the classics, because of the inelegance of the prose, they’re thinking of some variation on what Clement was doing, and to be fair he can be occasionally clunky, but I think far more often it works. The mix of the third-person narration and the Hunter’s running inner monologue reads almost like a script for a nature documentary, albeit one that David Attenborough would be pleased to narrate. Clement writes about the Hunter as if intelligent symbiotes from another planet were as real as hippos and alligators, something that always draws me to his writing even though the human characters, by comparison, feel like little more than abstractions.

Also unusually for a mystery, the Hunter does not immediately take advantage of Bob in order to find his adversary; actually he spends several months simply trying to understand human culture as filtered through Bob’s day-to-day life, along with making sure the boy doesn’t hurt himself too bad. A symbiote can, to some extent, heal the host’s body, but the importan thing for the Hunter is to make sure Bob stays mobile, so that when they finally do reach an understanding they’ll be able to venture out and see what they can do about the fugitive, who no doubt has similar plans. The curious result of the Hunter looking after Bob is that the former almost serves as a parental figure (mind you that we don’t even hear about Bob’s father until towards the end of Part 1), although it’d be more accurate to say he becomes Bob’s guardian angel. If Bob gets a bad cut then the Hunter can speed up the healing process, or at least quarantine the injury. But of course eventually Our Hero™ will have to make himself known to his human partner more directly, which concerns the back end of Part 1.

There Be Spoilers Here

The Hunter can do some things that would give Bob the impression of something being off about himself; he could ~~make Bob trip balls~~ mess with Bob’s vision and make it seem like he’s hallucinating, forming letters in the air in front of him. He could do things with Bob’s body that would certainly be unusual, unless there was a far-out explanation, like say, someone not strictly human being in contact with him. But the Hunter is, ultimately, little more than a lump of jelly who can’t even pick up a pencil without the host’s imput. He at least has used his time in Bob’s body to understand enough English (he becomes oddly fluent in it in five months, but that’s still more plausible than Frankenstein’s monster becoming a Shakespearean actor after eavesdropping on some random people), but not enough to understand the limits of the human physique. There’s only so much he can do.

One night the Hunter sneaks out of Bob (I don’t know if Clement understood the implications of what he was writing) and manages to write a note for him when he wakes up. Up to this point Bob was vaguely aware that something odd has been going on with him, and it’s not puberty—no matter how tempting it is to try to make that connection. While the revelation of Bob being in contact (and rather intimate roommates) with a symbiote can feel abrupt, at least by modern standards (no doubt Needle would be at least 300 pages long if written today), it’s not sudden. We have in fact, for most of Part 1, been building up to this moment—the moment when Our Alien Hero™ and his human partner make contact.

Bob wakes up to find this at his desk:

“Bob,” the note began—the Hunter did not yet fully realize that certain occasions call for more formal means of address—“these words apologize for the disturbance I caused you last night. I must speak to you; the twitching of muscles and catching of your voice were my attempts. I have not space here to tell who and where I am; but I can always hear you speak. If you are willing for me to try again, just say so. I will use the method you request; I can, if you relax, work your muscles as I did last night, or if you will look steadily at some fairly evenly illuminated object I can make shadow pictures in your own eyes. I will do anything else within my power to prove my words to you; but you must make the suggestions for such proofs. This is terribly important to both of us. Please let me try again.”

Bob, despite being a teenager, adjusts quickly enough to the fact that he can communicate with an alien that also happens to be living inside him. A little implausible? Maybe. Clement seems to go out of his way to prevent any chance of getting an allegorical or Freudian reading from the text, although some things seep through despite his best efforts. Bob is a good American high schooler who plays football in the fall while keeping an eye on his grades, and in typical Clement fashion as far as his human characters go Bob is perhaps too rational. No matter. Most of Part 1, and by extension about half the damn novel in its serial form, has been preoccupied with the Hunter getting his bearings straight rather than going after the fugitive, but now that the Hunter and his human have “found” each other, the game is now truly afoot. Still, how will they even hope to find that other symbiote, who after all can be hiding damn near anywhere? Stay tuned…

A Step Farther Out

This is… oddly cozy? There’s a mystery, sure, and a criminal to be captured, but the majority of Part 1 is just the Hunter trying to make sense of his surroundings and adjust accordingly’ in the process we find out a good deal about the biology of these blob-like aliens, and while we don’t find out much about their culture we do get to know how the Hunter and others like him interact (at least ideally) with their hosts. I’m of course thinking of Dax from Deep Space 9, who is also a symbiote, although the Hunter presumably can’t pass along memories between hosts. Bob is not exactly a unique character, being a pretty average teenage boy, but it’s how the Hunter tries to communicate with him (or even make himself known in the first place) that generates interest. I won’t be surprised if Clement ends up taking the easy way out with regards to how the hell the Hunter will be able to find the fugitive, but I’m willing to forgive that if he keeps up this level of intrigue and pseudo-documentary atmosphere. Despite taking place on Earth and evidently being aimed at a younger readership, I’m pretty stoked about this mixture of mystery and hard SF.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Medusa Was a Lady!” by William Tenn

February 17th, 2023

(Cover by Joe Tillotson. Fantastic Adventures, October 1951.)

Who Goes There?

William Tenn was, along with C. M. Kornbluth and Henry Kuttner, one of the great satirists of old-timey SF. He made his debut in 1946 with “Alexander the Bait,” a story which takes an unusually ambivalent (for the time) view of space flight, but more importantly he followed that up with “Child’s Play,” a brutal but genuinely funny comedy that rightly saw adaptation more than once. His 1953 story “The Liberation of Earth” might be his most famous, although while written for Galaxy Science Fiction it was deemed too ambivalent about both sides of the Cold War; it instead saw print in Future Science Fiction. “Ambivalent” is indeed a word that could describe the general mood of Tenn’s fiction—less hysterical than Kornbluth’s writing but also less prone to moments of humanity.

Tenn’s output declined after 1960, and by 1970 he had all but retired from the field. A hardcore short story writer, and despite living to be damn near 90 years old, Tenn left behind only one novel, Of Men and Monsters, whose title makes it sound more like a short story collection than a novel. Thus Tenn’s SF output is relatively small; his entire SF output, including Of Men and Monsters, has been collected in a measly two volumes (see below). Today’s story, “Medusa Was a Lady!,” seems at first to be Tenn venturing into fantasy writing—at first. More on that later.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures, which is on the Archive. This is one of Tenn’s more obscure stories; it’s been reprinted only three times, and under a different title: the less pulpy but lamer sounding “A Lamp for Medusa.” It was reprinted as one half of a Belmont Double, paired with Dave Van Arnam’s “The Players of Hell,” which if you can believe it is even more obscure. Then there’s your best shot at a book reprint, which is Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume II, from NESFA Press, the second of the two aforementioned volumes collecting all of Tenn’s SF.

Enhancing Image

Percy S. Yuss (we’re really doing this) is just your average Joe who may have made a bad investment and nabbed an apartment whose rent is a little too low. Immediately something both we and Percy learn is that if something sounds too good to be true, it most certainly is false. Mrs. Danner, the ratty landlady, demands an advance payment from Percy, who gives it despite having reservations about how much of a fixer-upper the apartment is; it doesn’t help that, for some reason, belongings from previous tenants have never been picked up or put away. But because he’s a modern man who disdains superstition Percy is convinced that nothing too weird could be going on, although while he is a bit of a chump he is no stone-cold idiot, and rightly suspects that something fishy might be going on.

Quickly realizing that the apartment is in such bad shape that it’s almost not even worth the tiny rent demanded for it, Percy tries to make the best of the situation when, being the protagonist of a William Tenn story, something weirder and more inexplicable happens to him. He finds a piece of parchment which, for one, seems to be made of animal skin, but even weirder is what’s written on it: a poem, or a fragment of a poem, that relates to Greek Mythology—more specifically the legend of Perseus and Medusa. The dramatic irony of this is that the fragment does not name Perseus or Medusa, so while we the readers are aware of the myth, Percy remains ignorant of the connection. I’ll quote the fragment here:

“…He slew the Gorgon and winged back, bringing to the islanders

The head with its writhing snake-locks, the terror that froze to stone.”

Reading the fragment has an effect that Percy could not have anticipated. When he takes a bath he gets isekai’d to the middle of an ocean, in the bathtub with nothing but a towel and soap in his mouth. He meets a sea serpent who uhh, talks? Which surprisingly does not frighten Percy or drive him into an existential crisis; actually he takes the encounter with the talking sea serpent (whose dialogue reminds me of Douglas Adams) pretty well. The sea serpent at first believes Percy to be part of the Perseus prophecy, but Percy’s hostility drives the sea serpent away. A running thing with this story is that, depending on whom Percy is interacting with, he’ll either be denying the prophecy or deliberately playing into it, since he gets constantly mistaken for the Greek hero. Or perhaps, by some chance, Percy is really Perseus but something happened to make him forget?

Readers of a certain pre-Tolkien era of American fantasy may feel that the situation Percy gets thrown into is oddly familiar. I’m of course thinking of the Harold Shea stories by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and even L. Ron Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky, and I have little doubt that Tenn had at least read up on the former. A normal man gets thrown into a fantasy world that operates on a different internal logic from the normal world, and said normal man has to figure his way out or perish, with often comedic results. Truth be told this was not unusual for fantasy published in Unknown, and we could go back even further with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter series to see basically the same formula. (The John Carter novels are very loosely considered SF, but they arguably read more as fantasy from a modern perspective.) “Medusa Was a Lady!” very much follows in the footsteps of the Harold Shea stories, but with a couple twists.

Percy uses his bathtub cum boat to land on the island on Seriphos, which is where, in the myth, Perseus as a child and his mother Danae land. Had he known about the myth in advance Percy could use this to his advantage, but because he doesn’t recognize the myth for what it is—that he basically matches the physical description of Perseus (albeit scrawnier)—he probably would’ve done fine right away, but unfortunately for Percy he doesn’t know shit about the myth. He doesn’t know who Perseus and Danae are, which causes issues because he’s accused of impersonating a mythical figure—a crime punishable by slow cooking over a fire.

Some hijinks ensue. We’re introduced to King Polydectes, who might be the funniest character in the story, being a stereotypical decadent monarch who looks for any excuse to “thin out” the overpopulated little island society he runs. He orders executions very casually and comes up with punishments for crimes seemingly on a whim, and because the island is so small people often serve multiple roles, such that literally anyone can be a juror in a “court” case. I would complain about how the ’50s slang coming out of the islanders’ mouths stretches plausibility, but this is not a story that claims to be plausible, and also the slang adds to the snappy tone of the comedy. Again I almost have to wonder if Tenn’s brand of humor influenced Douglas Adams’s, although I seriously doubt that.

Awaiting his execution, which is set for the following day, Percy gets thrown into the same cell as a fellow person from his own world: Ann Drummond (like Andromeda?), who was one of the former tenants in the apartment Percy had rented out, and who had apparently gotten thrown into this world through the same means. We’re also formally introduced to Hermes, who had appeared earlier but then vanished from the scene, a mythological figure who rather conspicuously had golden skin. Hermes offers help to Percy and Ann so that they can fulfill the prophecy, and evidently he knows a great deal more than they do—only a fraction of which he lets on. Something to keep in mind with Percy’s journey is that he never entirely understands anything; when he tries ringing an explanation out of someone he only gets one small part out of a much greater whole, assuming what the person is saying is true. Hermes doesn’t like to Percy and Ann per se, but we’ll come to find later that there may be an ulterior motive for getting Percy to fill his role as a makeshift Perseus.

Anyway, we stay like this for a while. The pacing of this novella is a bit odd; it spends a great deal of time on characters talking and rationalizing things while also making surprisingly little progress in terms of getting from one place to another. By the time we get to the next day and Percy and Ann are thrown into the arena as an alternative method of execution (Hermes had sabotaged the pot that was supposed to be used to cook them the previous night) we’re already about halfway into the story. While Tenn was some five years into his writing career, he evidently was less sure about writing longer stories (specifically of novella length), at least up to this point. There’s enough material in “Medusa Was a Lady!” to make a full novel out of, but then Tenn was not a novelist by instinct, so we have to live with what admittedly feels like a novel that got Swiss cheese’d into a novella.

Anyway, this fight in the arena with a bizarre multi-headed monster (sort of like a hydra but uncannily more humanoid) is the closest we get to a satisfying action sequence, because after this point the story reveals itself to be something quite different altogether.

There Be Spoilers Here

When I first heard about this story I thought it odd that it should be classified as science fiction, since its premise clearly struck me as fantasy; well, not unlike with Percy, what I’d seen was not the full picture. “Medusa Was a Lady!” is, in actuality, science fiction masquerading as fantasy. Well goddamnit, it looks like we been bamboozled! Hermes comes in with anti-gravity boots, which Percy will also use later, and we’re even introduced to a mad scientist in the form of Professor Gray, who (predictably) was also a tenant who got thrown into this world. It’s here that we find out that not only is the novella science fiction, but more specifically it’s a multiverse story. That’s right, there’s no escaping the goddamn multiverse thing.

More interestingly, you may be wondering about the fight with Medusa, which we know is gonna happen because it’s on the cover and because it’s “part of the prophecy.” The “fight” with Medusa lasts literally a paragraph and its sheer brevity took me by surprise, partly because of that and also because Medusa doesn’t seem to put up a fight. How strange, that the infamous Gorgon, the snake woman who turns men to stone, should lose her head so easily. As it turns out, in his willingness to fill a role, like an actor on a stage, Percy does something he probably should not have done, because it turns out that Medusa is not the villain of the story. Hermes and the other gold-skinned people, the Olympians who wanted Medusa dead so badly, only told Percy a fraction of the context for the conflict between the Olympians and the Gorgons; it could be considered one big lie by way of omission. The good news is that Medusa isn’t quite dead once her head is in the bag, which leads to what I can only call an infodump of staggering length.

If I tried to explain the whole backstory for Medusa and the Gorgons I would be here all day, which is a problem because a) I don’t have the time, and b) Tenn’s explanation via telepathy is incredibly convoluted, never mind a massive infodump to plop in the reader’s lap in the last, oh, ten pages of the novella. I’m not sure if Tenn did this as a serious attempt or if he was making fun of something, but the third act of the novella is bogged down with a mountain of exposition, followed by rushed action. The basic idea of the thing is a neat subversion, because we just went in assuming Medusa would be the Big Bad™ of the story, or in more typical Tenn fashion would be more of a shrew than a conventional evil-doer, but the twist is much harder to anticipate—admirably so. I just wish the pacing in particular wasn’t so uneven, with the climactic battle with the gold-skinned Olympians lacking room to breathe and thus is robbed of some catharsis.

The ending, at least, is clever, even if it plays into Tenn’s pessimism. There’s the suggestion that, even if Percy did get to be the man who now knows better, he will still get played for a chump at the end. The implied cruelty is logical, if also predictable, while also implying possible paradoxes and other issues with people meeting themselves via the multiverse. Honestly I think I’m done with the whole multiverse thing for a while.

A Step Farther Out

In a way I was disappointed, but in another my expectations were very much met. Joe Tillotson’s excellent cover and the premise give the impression of a fantasy adventure, which evidently Tenn was not very interested in writing; that or he tried but failed to write compelling action. Thankfully, most of the story is filled with dialogue, and this is where Tenn excels, in that he packs a lot of jokes and a lot of those jokes are quite funny. “Medusa Was a Lady!” is ultimately a comedy, and an effective one, being admirably less a direct parody of sword and sorcery, or even Greek mythology, so much as a humorous commentary on the intermingling of fact and mythology. Nothing Percy is told turns out to be entirely true, but conversely every bit of deception has at least a kernel of truth in it, which only befits Tenn’s pessimistic worldview. I recommend not going into this one with the expectation of reading a fantasy adventure, but if you want a genre-bending comedy that’s a fair bit cerebral, it’s a good one.

See you next time.
The Observatory: The Pleasant Duality of Robert Heinlein and Anson MacDonald

February 15th, 2023

(Robert Heinlein, as sketched in the April-May issue of Amazing Stories. Artist uncredited.)

In the January 1980 issue of Analog Science Fiction there’s a special feature covering the history of the Analytical Laboratory. An attempt at calculating author popularity, the Analytical Laboratory is a monthly feature wherein authors’ pieces from a given issue are ranked based on reader response, and the results, surprisingly, matter: the author to get the top spot receives a bonus payment. The aforementioned special feature includes a ranking of the most popular authors to appear in Astounding/Analog between 1938 and 1976, with a couple quirks: pseudonyms get their own entries, and each author must have had at least ten fiction pieces published in the magazine. The funny result was that Robert Heinlein, one of the most famous of all SF authors and arguably the single most important author in the history of American SF, was and was not at the top.

Heinlein, under his own name, came in at a very respectable second place, with “Anson MacDonald,” having published just enough works to meet the minimum, taking the top spot. Presumably the serial installments for Sixth Column and Beyond This Horizon, both by MacDonald, count as individual entries. MacDonald was, of course, also Heinlein, or rather Heinlein was MacDonald. Heinlein’s middle name is Anson, after all, and apparently he came up with MacDonald, a Scottish-sounding name, to appeal to editor John W. Campbell.

But let’s rewind a bit.

Heinlein made his genre debut in the August 1939 issue of Astounding with “Life-Line,” a science-fantasy yarn (Heinlein had also submitted it to Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy-oriented sister magazine) that, contrary to most debut stories by great authors, still reads well. It also proved pretty popular with readers, ranking second in the Analytical Laboratory for the October 1939 issue. Still, while it was and still is a good read, “Life-Line” was only a small taste of the storm to come. Heinlein only published one more story in 1939 with “Misfit,” but 1940 immediately kicked off with what can only be called a one-author renaissance. In the January 1940 issue of Astounding we got “Requiem,” one of Heinlein’s most popular early stories, having been adapted for radio multiple times, and which was pretty close to winning the Retro Hugo for the Best Short Story of 1940, only losing to Isaac Asimov’s iconic “Robbie.”

The February 1940 issue saw the first installment of If This Goes On—, an ambitious if uneven piece of work (see my review of both installments here and here) that showed a highly talented writer who was quickly becoming a master. For the June 1940 issue Heinlein got the cover a second time with “The Roads Must Roll,” also hugely popular, also getting adapted for radio, and also, like If This Goes On—, depicting a future United States that seemed to have its own history—a future history, if you will. Heinlein’s ambition, especially with regards to worldbuilding and imagining future technological breakthroughs, was mesmerizing, and his takeover of Astounding was the swiftest the field had ever known. Within two years he had turned the field on its head with a series of short stories and novellas that were often both revolutionary and highly readable. The language of American science fiction was quickly becoming Heinlein’s language.

There was just one problem: Heinlein was only one person. At this highly prolific early stage in his career he had more material than he could publish in a single issue of Astounding, which after all was the highest paying of the SF magazines. There were a few alternatives. Heinlein made his fantasy debut in the September 1940 issue of Unknown with “The Devil Makes the Law,” later reprinted and better known as “Magic, Inc.” He also appeared a few times in Super Science Stories under the pseudonym Lyle Monroe, but that is not the pseudonym we’re here to talk about today. No, if Heinlein was to appear more often in Astounding (and by 1941 he needed to, so productive was he), another name would have to do the trick. Thus he came up with Anson MacDonald, combining his middle name with a last name that would appeal to Campbell’s sensibilities. Actually getting that extra work published in Astounding would be no issue; Campbell wanted to buy damn near everything Heinlein was selling.

The January 1941 issue thus saw the “debut” of Anson MacDonald with the serialization of Sixth Column, which in reality was Heinlein’s first novel. Based on an outline by Campbell, Sixth Column was a rare instance of Heinlein writing fiction on someone else’s orders, and the novel’s unfortunate Yellow Peril plot can only be partly blamed on him. Not that readers were immediately aware of the novel being a Heinlein work anyway, although the connection between Heinlein and MacDonald was not exactly a clever ruse. Still, the novel was evidently a hit with readers; all three installments ranked #1 in the Analytical Laboratory. “Heinlein” was absent for the January issue, but for February and March he appeared with stories of his own, in the forms of “—And He Built a Crooked House” (one of my personal favorites) and “Logic of Empire” respectively; incidentally both of those came in second to the MacDonald serial. There were a few more issues in 1941 which saw both Heinlein and MacDonald side by side, the two working in tandem and always (somehow) exploring different corners of SF.

(Cover by Hubert Rogers. Astounding, January 1941.)

1941 was about as major a year for Heinlein as it could be for any author, and indeed skimming through the contents of Astounding during this year it lays claim to marking the very apex of the Campbellian Golden Age. Despite having debuted only two years prior, Heinlein was undoubtedly the biggest talent in the field, puncutated by him being made Guest of Honor at the 1941 Worldcon (held in Denver that year), the last Worldcon before the US entered World War II; there would not be another one until 1946. 1941 was the year that saw Heinlein and MacDonald dominating Astounding, often in the same issue. On top of Sixth Column we also got our first novel-length serial under Heinlein’s own name with Methuselah’s Children, but more importantly we saw, from “both” authors, a string of short stories that were almost always home runs. From Heinlein you got “Universe” and its sequel “Common Sense,” and from MacDonald you got “Solution Unsatisfactory” and the classic time travel novella “By His Bootstraps.”

Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever, and the imaginary duo of Heinlein and MacDonald was soon was to come to an end—although, oddly, it was Heinlein who “left” first. As the US entered the war at the tail end of 1941 people of certain professions were needed, to help the war effort if not to see combat directly; thus in 1942 we saw Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and some other Astounding regulars step away from their typewriters and put their degrees to good use. Heinlein, along with Asimov and de Camp, went to work at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, but not before handing a few final gems before he went on hiatus. Strangely 1942 did not see Heinlein’s name at all, but we did get MacDonald flying solo (as it were), along with the one-off pseudonym John Riverside for the haunting fantasy-horror novella “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.” Heinlein (as MacDonald) made sure to go out with a bang, though.

First we have the serialization of Beyond This Horizon, which was also a hit with readers, and even later won the Retro Hugo for Best Novel. Beyond This Horizon is one of the weirdest pieces from Heinlein’s early period, and in some ways it anticipates the idiosyncrasies of later, longer, more (in)famous novels like Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Because this is still early Heinlein, though, it’s a more concise and decidedly more left-leaning affair, albeit tempered with that militarism which in fact characterized Heinlein’s writing from the beginning. Then we have the novella “Waldo,” which also won a Retro Hugo, and whose influence outside the field is so palpable that we actually have technology which takes its name after the story: the waldo, a remote-controlled manipulator used for hazardous materials. Finally we have the borderline Lovecraftian story “Goldfish Bowl,” which sees Heinlein pit humanity against incomprehensible life forms which may or may not be alien in origin.

Sadly, by the end of 1942, Heinlein had left the field, and he would also take the MacDonald name with him. While Heinlein returned to the field stronger than ever in 1947, MacDonald did not.

Not unlike Richard Bachman, a persona which allowed Stephen King to publish works not strictly “on-brand” for him, MacDonald allowed Heinlein to really stretch his legs and further dominate Astounding. Authors have a plethora of reasons for concocting pseudonyms, but Heinlein had a straightforward reason for creating MacDonald and their “relationship” was quite a symbiotic one. If you were to pick up, say, the May 1941 issue of Astounding you could have Heinlein via “Universe” or MacDonald via “Solution Unsatisfactory,” two very different stories by the same man. The fact that Heinlein took the top two spots in that special Analytical Laboratory feature I mentioned at the beginning goes to show that his talents were enough to be spread across multiple names and still have all of them produce classic works. For a brief time he was not one but two of the most popular authors to appear in Astounding‘s pages.
Serial Review: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard (Part 3/3)

February 13th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, November 1934.)

Who Goes There?

We’re at the point where I probably don’t have to introduce Robert E. Howard to you, but I’ll do it anyway; or rather I’ll elaborate on what makes Howard special. Fantasy is a very old genre, but it’s much less so as practiced by American authors, at least if we’re talking fantasy as separated from horror. It doesn’t help that historically the magazine market hasn’t been very kind towards fantasy, but for a stretch Weird Tales was the most famous and most prolific outlet for American fantasy, and it was where Howard published much of his most famous work. Of course Howard was looking for several outlets at the same time, since he was such a massively productive writer, whether it be his fantasy, his horror, or hell, his stories about boxing. Oddly enough, though, he was basically absent from the then-growing science fiction scene, and one has to wonder if he would have eventually moved into SF had he lived longer.

Howard’s life was tragically short, and yet he wrote more in the span of a decade than most authors (especially today) write in fifty years. His tales of Conan the Barbarian alone take up several volumes, despite the fact that he was only able to write one Conan novel with The Hour of the Dragon. Conan is, of course, the godfather of sword-and-sorcery heroes, despite not even being Howard’s first such character. Conan is really more of an icon than a character with traits people recognize, whether it’s his very loose film depiction via Arnold Schwarzenegger or the more faithful paintings done by Frank Frazetta. As depicted in the original Howard stories, Conan shows himself to be quite different from people’s assumptions.

Placing Coordinates

Part 3 was published in the November 1934 issue of Weird Tlaes, which is on the Archive. Because Howard has been dead for almost 90 years at this point, pretty much all of his work is in the public domain, including The People of the Black Circle, which you can read in its entirety on Project Gutenberg. If you want a book copy, you have plenty of options; the Conan stories have been perpetually in print (albeit subject to some editing fuckery early on) for the past several decades.

Enhancing Image

Sadly there’s not a whole lot for me to say about the conclusion to this gripping novella; not the story’s fault really, it’s more that I’m not a very good reader and even worse when it comes to action. Howard has a sixth sense for writing action and suspense, although given how much there is of it in the third installment you might start to get the impression that Howard is grasping at straws, or rather ways in which he can challenge his nigh-invincible anti-hero.

To recap, Conan has teamed up with fellow gun for hire Kerim Shah to rescue Yasmina from the Black Seers of Yimsha, with help from some redshirts under Kerim Shah’s leadership. Kerim Shah and the Black Seers were originally working for the same country but the latter went rogue and snatched up Yasmina for their own ends. A bit of a disappointment, albeit an inevitable one, with this installment is that Yasmina is absent for much of it; she’s too busy being a damsel. I bring this up because Yasmina is almost as good a Conan woman as Bêlit from “Queen of the Black Coast,” which if I remember right was my first Conan story. I may have set up an unfair precedent with that one. Howard wrote “Queen of the Black Coast” and The People of the Black Circle close to each other, and I get the impression that at this point in his career he got pretty good at writing women who have personalities and agency. Bêlit has the advantage of being a criminal, the titular queen of the black coast, while Yasmina is filthy royalty (no truce with queens), but nobody’s perfect.

Conan, now armed with the magic girdle Khemsa had given him in the last installment, proves to be very valuable; arguably it’s the only reason he’s able to get out of this conflict alive. Something I’ve noted before and which I still like is that the enemy Conan faces off with in this story is objectively way more powerful than him, and even Conan admits that defeating the Seers for good is basically impossible. The key objective then is not to beat the Seers so much as to rescue Yasmina and get the hell out of there as fast as possible—which, naturally, involves facing off with the Seers and their underlings to some capacity. I don’t feel like recounting every detail of that journey, since it’s one long action sequence and I’m tired, but I do feel like pointing out a few things, such as…

Howard seems to be of the belief that when in doubt, throw a big aggressive animal at the protagonist. Not even an animal that’s all that fantastical, just take a normal animal and make it the size of a car. One of the first enemies Conan fights in this installment is a really big dog. How exciting. We also get giant magical snakes later on, which are at least marginally more exciting because of how Conan has to defeat them; it involves balls. I’m also pretty sure these snakes inspired this memorable interior, courtesy of Hugh Rankin. I can easily imagine Conan stories, especially this one, being adapted into an adventure flick in the ’50s or ’60s with stop-motion effects by Ray Harryhausen, although I doubt the gore would be replicated.

Speaking of gore, I was wondering, at the end of the last installment, if Conan and Kerim Shah would fight the Seers together and then have an epic duel in the aftermath, or if there would be a betrayal beforehand; turns out I was wrong about both. The master of the Seers, who last we checked was subjecting Yasmina to some pretty far-out torture, doesn’t care too much about Conan and Kerim Shah invading his private space—not because he doesn’t mind them but because he sees them as little more than petulant flies. While Conan was able to deal with the underlings and the giant snakes at the cost of a few redshirts, this forthcoming battle won’t be as easy. Actually it’s a battle that Conan hopes not to win outright so much as to incapacitate the master long enough to rescue Yasmina.

A barbarian would have absolutely no chance against such a high-level wizard—not even a certified badass like Conan, were it not for that magic girdle. Indeed the gift from Khemsa had saved him before; the aforementioned big dog went after the redshirts but ignored Conan for reasons he did not understand at first. No doubt the girdle has symbolic value: Khemsa used it to good effect when protecting Gitara, his girlfriend, while Conan is using it to help him in rescuing Yasmina. Is it quaint that we’re supposed to believe Conan and Yasmina love each other despite having known each other for less than a week and being mostly on the run during that short time? Maybe, but what’s a good old-fashioned adventure yarn without some high-spirited romance? Even for a super-macho guy like Conan.

There Be Spoilers Here

I was gonna discuss Kerim Shah’s death in the previous section, but realized a) it really is a spoiler, and b) I should probably hold off on talking about it. I just say that because it’s pretty gnarly; it’s the most memorable part of the novella’s concluding installment. The Conan series is not averse to gore at all, but even by its standards this man goes out in a gruesome fashion. When Conan and Kerim Shah confront the master of the Seers the creepy guy YANKS KERIM SHAH’S HEART OUT OF HIS BODY. Like it’s the easiest thing in the world, too. Since Kerim Shah isn’t protected by any kind of magic, well, honestly he probably should’ve seen that coming. Even so, Howard’s talent for describing visceral action kicks into high gear and the result is almost mesmerizing with how grotesque it is.

Observe in all its glory:

He held out his hand as if to receive something, and the Turanian cried out sharply like a man in mortal agony. He reeled drunkenly, and then, with a splintering of bones, a rending of flesh and muscle and a snapping of mail-links, his breast burst outward with a shower of blood, and through the ghastly aperture something red and dripping shot through air into the Master’s outstretched hand, as a bit of steel leaps to the magnet. The Turanian slumped to the floor and lay motionless, and the Master laughed and hurled the object to fall before Conan’s feet—a still-quivering human heart.

Anyway, Conan manages to “defeat” the master, nab Yasmina, and get the hell out of Yimsha, although by Conan’s own admission his defeat of the master is by no means permanent; it’s mighty hard to kill such a powerful wizard. But wait, we’re not quite out of the woods yet! In the previous installment Conan’s henchmen, by way of misunderstanding, thought he had betrayed them, so now we have to tie up that loose end with one last battle where Conan makes it clear that he was loyal to his homies the whole time. We also get what is implied to be the final appearance of the master of the Seers, in the form of a big bird (not to be confused with Big Bird), because, like I said, when in doubt just take an animal and super-size it.

The ending sees Conan and Yasmina parting ways, as is to be expected. Yasmina is the love interest of the week, and as is custom she must either die or be unable to “tame” the Cimmerian. I’m not sure if this story takes place before or after “Queen of the Black Coast,” but probably after. Bêlit was, as far as I can tell, the closest Conan had to a true love, which due to tragic circumstances was not to be. Yasmina is in many ways a worthy partner, but as queen of Vendhya she has an obligation to her people—an obligation that Conan refuses to take part in; wisely he chooses his nomadic lifestyle over being forced into becoming something he’s not in the name of love. This all reminds me of the back end of Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road, albeit more concise and without those weird Heinlein-isms.

Now I’m just thinking about what the field would look like had Howard and Heinlein crossed paths, since they’re both such unique personalities and have such odd views of how man ought to interact with the society around him. Mind you that Heinlein started out as a quirky New Deal Democrat and only later became the quirky right-libertarian we recognize him as, and meanwhile Howard’s political outlook is… harder to parse. At least in the Conan stories, however, his sympathy for barbarism (or rather his definition of barbarism, which involves being quasi-civilized) is easy enough to understand. Conan’s capacity to stay a free individual and keep himself outside the confines of normal society is what makes him such a noble figure despite his penchant for criminal activities, at least for Howard. So ends yet another adventure for the Cimmerian.

A Step Farther Out

I’m conflicted about the length of this thing. It could’ve been streamlined and shortened, but also it could’ve been expanded to novel length so that we get more character development. The scale Howard invokes here is enough to fill a modern fantasy novel (so like 600 pages), but he’s content to give us a novella that would fill 90 to a hundred pages. I might still prefer “Queen of the Black Coast” if we’re talking Conan, but it’s hard to fault The People of the Black Circle for its heightened ambition. Also, while there is some old-timey misogyny at play, Howard proves once again that he was pretty ahead of his time with regards to writing female characters. The relationship between Conan and Yasmina is a bit rushed but both parties are assertive types with their own agendas, and while Conan clearly has an upper hand physically they’re mostly shown to be equal partners. This is also one of the longest of the original Conan stories (albeit still a novella), so now I’m curious as to what the sole Conan novel (that Howard wrote) looks like.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Let Me Live in a House” by Chad Oliver

February 10th, 2023

(Cover by Robert Gibson Jones. Universe, March 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Chad Oliver was one of many authors who came about just in time for the bubbling of the SFF magazine market in the first half of the ’50s; he debuted in 1950, and more than half his short fiction was published by 1960. Despite being a mainstay of the ’50s, there were certain oddities about Oliver’s background and character that separated him from his fellows, namely that he was an academic—more specifically he was an anthropologist, first as a student and later as a staff member at the University of Texas. His 1952 thesis “They Builded a Tower” had to be one of the first academic papers about “modern” SF, and his preoccupation with wedding academia with SF in the ’50s coincided with the likes of Jack Williamson and others bringing the genre to the world of higher education. He was also, a little unusually (and admirably) for the time, vocal about his sympathies for indigenous peoples, with his westerns and some of his SF apparently depicting Native Americans as flesh-and-blood people.

Before Ursula K. Le Guin became SF’s leading anthropologist (among other things), there was Chad Oliver. Given his background, it should be less surprising that Oliver’s fiction is less concerned with individuals and more so with cultures. In the case of his SF we’re talking alien cultures, and with today’s story, “Let Me Live in a House,” we’re given quite the taste of what Oliver’s game is. What a great title, by the way. It’s vaguely ominous, is open to several meanings, and while the alternate title “A Friend to Man” is perfectly fine (the irony is what sells it), this is much better.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1954 issue of Universe Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s one of those stories that showed up more than once in the magazines; its first British publication was in the June 1956 issue of Authentic Science Fiction, which you can find here. For old-timey book appearances we have the Groff Conklin anthology Science Fiction Terror Tales and the Oliver collection The Edge of Forever: Classic Anthropological Science Fiction. If you want in-print options then you do have a couple, and one of them is huge—quite literally. First we have the hardcover Oliver collection from NESFA Press, Far from This Earth and Other Stories. Then we have what drew my attention to this story in the first place, The Big Book of Science Fiction (at over 1,100 two-columned pages it lives up to its title), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I can see why the VancerMeers, as champions of weird fiction, picked this one out…

Enhancing Image

We start with what seems like suburbia, only it’s smaller and more isolated than the norm. We have two cottages next to each other, each adequately but quaintly fitted. Framed in one of these cottages is part of a poem; Oliver doesn’t cite it, but it’s “The House by the Side of the Road” by Sam Walter Foss, and we only get one line from it: “Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.” On its face it’s meant to be optimistic, but the events that follow will put a much darker spin on it.

The two cottages are enclosed in a dome, or as it’s called a bubble. We’re not on Earth, but on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. Two couples live here: Gordon and his wife Helen, and their neighbors Barton and Mary. Gordon is our protagonist, and for some reason he’s the only one of the four who doesn’t act like everything is normal; in a way his lack of contentment with his environment makes him look normal, and the others strange. Unfortunately for Gordon, who already is not that happy a camper, he and the others live on the side of Ganymede that overlaps with the Twilight Zone. No, but in all seriousness I’m surprised this wasn’t adapted for a Twilight Zone episode, or The Outer Limits. Life under the dome starts out uncanny and things only get worse from there. The grass and foliage are artificial. The “weather” is programmed. There are no animals.

If the outsider is uncanny then life inside one of these cottages is little better. There’s no communication with the outside world (well, with Earth), there’s no way to leave the dome, and for entertainment your options are limited and quickly exhausted. There’s a TV—a “tri-di,” which I take to be a 3D set (because 3D was also a fad in the ’50s, history repeating itself)—but it’s all pre-programmed and much like with an iPod Touch circa 2012 you run out of variety quickly. Oh, and there’s board games. Cool.

Even the act of talking becomes minotonous.

They exchanged such small talk as there was. Since they had all been doing precisely the same things for seven months, there wasn’t much in the way of startling information to be passed back and forth. The bulk of the conversation was taken up with Mary’s opinion of the latest tri-di shows, and it developed that she liked them all.

The sheer monotomy of living under a small dome for months seems close to breaking Gordon already when something unforeseen happens. One “night” the four hear a sound—a whistling noise over their heads—that they know for a fact can’t be coming from inside the dome. Hell, it can’t be coming from outside the dome either; that’s not how sound in space works. Gordon and Barton enter a hidden equipment room and check what has to be the ’50s equivalent of convenience store CCTV footage. An arc of light, perhaps a meteor, passed over the dome at “night”—or, perhaps, it could be something else. Gordon tells himself it has to be a meteor, but even at this early point he’s not doing a great job at convincing himself. I’m amazed Gordon made it this far, considering he seems on the verge of cracking at any moment. Then again, his relatively loose grip on reality will prove something of an asset.

I know I’m bringing up the time period in which this story was written a lot, but you have to keep in mind that “Let Me Live in a House” could not have been written any later than 1963 (when John F. Kennedy caught a bullet with his brain), and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Oliver’s decision to model life under the dome after a rather stripped-down parody of middle-class suburbia was very much deliverate. There’s a whole subgenre of ’50s SF stories that take pot shots at the growing middle-class suburban population and this is one of them. This story could not have been written twenty years before or after; in 1934 people were fighting just to get jobs, and in 1974 there was the oil crisis. There’s this satire of complacency as the result of economic prosperity; not to say it’s a comedy, because it really isn’t, but satire can be serious, in its message if not on its face.

Here they were, he thought—four human beings on a moon as big as a planet, three hundred and ninety million miles from the Earth that had sent them there. Four human beings, encased in two little white cottages under an air bubble on the rock and ice that was Ganymede. Here they were—waiting.

Waiting for the ship from home that was not due for five months. Waiting all alone in an abandoned solar system, with only sound effects and visual gimmicks for company. Waiting in an empty universe, sustained by a faith in something that had almost been lost.

Hey, remember this bit? “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” I’m not sure where this originated. It was used in the Fredric Brown short story “Knock” (which I haven’t read yet), but I don’t think that’s where it comes from. Regardless it’s a great little two-sentence horror yarn. Well, anyway, the only four people on Ganymede are hanging out in a cottage, when there’s a knock on the door…

Someone’s knocking on the door, and right after an unscheduled storm in a dome on Ganymede. Not long after what looked like a meteor passed this-a-way. Hmmm. After much hesitation Gordon lets the stranger in, and—he’s just an old guy, although miraculously he looks just like a portrait hanging in the cottage, of some guy named Grandfather Walters. (I don’t know if he’s related to anyone.) Somehow he got in here. Is he an alien? That’s the first and most likely answer. But if so, what kind of alien? Is he benevolent? How come he looks perfectly human? A lot of aliens in SF (especially TV) look humanoid or just straight-up like people because of either budget constraints or because the writers weren’t being very creative. We do, however, get a pretty good reason for why the alien, who calls himself “John,” looks like a normal person, but I won’t say what it is for now.

See, all this is rather stagey. We have one location, a grand total of five characters (not even supporting characters, this is all we get), and it’s pretty chatty. There’s very little action, and that’s for later. John doesn’t come in looking to subdue the men with giant tentacles and capture the women for his own perverted ends, but rather comes here to talk; he’s a guest at the cottage and he’s staying for the night whether the other people like it or not. In a way he’s more threatening than the average alien because we honestly don’t know what his deal is, and yet his appearance is hard to explain regardless of the rationale. There’s the burning question of how the hell he got into the dome, and maybe just as importantly, where the hell he came from. It’s implied, of course, that he came by via the meteor, but that doesn’t explain much. Again, how did he get inside the dome?

He’s not here to conquer Earth, and he’s not here to cause too much trouble. He’s also upfront about not being human; the appearance is merely a stand-in for—something else. By all rights and indications he’s an alien, which is a problem for Gordon, because if John is an alien, then…

Another thing about John you may notice is that he speaks English perfectly fine. He also, oddly and humorously (in that satirical way, like I said), has a tendency to spew of-the-time jargon and slogans like a computer trying to imitate human speech. Like I said about aliens appearing humanoid, aliens understanding English like it’s a first language is often the result of writers not being very creative, but again (again, again…), there’s a reason why John is able to do this—although the explanation Oliver gives us would not be deemed so plausible nowadays. You see, there used to be a huge thing about ESP back in ’40s and ’50s SF, not least because of John W. Campbell’s obsession with ESP (many casualties because of authors shoehorning in ESP to appeal to Campbell), but also because it just seemed like a popular topic for writers. So John apparently (we’re “told” through a demonstration, in which Gordon suffers a bad trip) has psi powers.

Hey, remember “Who Goes There?,” the novella that inspired The Thing? (Speaking of Campbell.) Do you remember, in the original story, how the alien copied its victims and was even able to mimic their personalities? You probably forgot because the scene where we get that explanation is one where nothing exciting happens. Anyway, the alien is a telepath and it able to look into people’s minds—more specifically it was able to delve into their dreams. Very odd explanation, very on-brand for a Campbell explanation, and Oliver also makes John an alien that can read people’s minds. He’s able to copy people’s behavior and persumably was able to mimic the look of Grandfather Walters because he’s a telepath. Among other things. How much he’s capable of is never fully revealed.

Helen and their neighbors, who reacted like everything was normal when John came along, are sort of overwhelmed by the alien’s presence and the abnormality of the situation makes them catatonic; their conditioning, which evidently worked more on them than on Gordon, works too well. Gordon, being the only abnormal one of the bunch, is not driven over the edge by the rush of visions John gives him, but now he’s left as the only person who can talk with the alien. The second half of the story is largely concerned with the dialogue these two have, and it would all read as too stagey and chatty if not for Oliver’s way of writing conservation. That and, through mostly just dialogue, he’s able to turn the screw, as the saying goes, with a mounting sense of dread that reaches Lovecraftian levels.

There Be Spoilers Here

John comes from a race of aliens that mimics others, and fittingly does not have a home planet; just as fittingly, considering Oliver’s profession, they mimic other people’s cultures. You have an alien which is telepathic and which can absorb the language and even the lingo of other species, and can even take on their appearance. Unlike Campbell’s alien however, which has the straightforward mission of getting the hell off Earth (in Campbell’s story it builds an anti-gravity pack, in The Thing it’s building a spaceship), John’s goal is harder to discern. To Gordon it doesn’t matter too much, though, since if John is an alien (and he is), then, according to Gordon, man’s goal of colonizing the solar system has come to an abrupt end. For Gordon, and apparently for his superiors, the one thing worse than man being alone in the universe is man not being alone in the universe.

Because if mankind is not the only spacefaring race in the universe, then mankind is not at the top of the food chain. Worse yet, mankind is a minor race that, so far, has not been able to transfer any of its native cultures abroad. The dome on Ganymede is an experiment destined to fail because it’s a prototype for a colony that does not meet the minimum requirements for a culture to thrive. Oliver supposes that mankind, if it is to live in space, must either carry on a previous culture (difficult) or form a new culture practically from whole cloth (at least as difficult). The lack of a culture will (so he implies) drive men insane. The TV, the board games, the neighborly small talk the people in the dome engage with are cultural artifacts, but they’re not enough. The dome has more than one person in it, but it’s little more than a hint at a society. This is not enough.

In John’s words:

“In the long run, you see,” John continued, “it is the totality of little things that goes to make up a culture. A man such as yourself does not simply sit in a room; he sits in a room of a familiar type, with pictures on the walls and dust in the corners and lamps on the tables. A man does not just eat; he eats special kinds of food that he has been conditioned to want, served as he has been trained to want them to be served, in containers he is accustomed to, in a social setting that he is familiar with, that he fits into, that he belongs in. All intelligent life is like that, you see.”

Meanwhile John comes from a race whose special quality is the ability to assimilate other people’s cultures; fittingly they also don’t have a home planet of their own, but are perpetually spacefaring. They seem to go after any intelligent race they can find and take on their appearance and culture, for their own selfish ends. No doubt if ants were as intelligent as humans then members of John’s race would take on the likeness of ants. John is a bad actor, but his maliciousness comes down to the fact that he sees these people as little more than game—like hunting a not very impressive buck. Regardless, someone will probably be dead by the end of the night. The only hope Gordon has of retaining his dream of space travel for mankind is to get rid of John, and make sure nobody on Earth founds out. Yet how did David feel when he took on Goliath? How can Gordon deal with this thing he doesn’t (and can’t) entirely understand?

Thus Gordon is confronted with a member of a race that sees mankind as barely sentient—hardly worth thinking about. Mankind is to John’s race what pigs are to men. “Does the hungry man worry about whether or not pigs have dreams?” Yet there must be a way to defeat him, and indeed there is. While John is able to take on the likeness of a given thing, the likeness is merely a mirage; he looks like a man but he does not feel like one. Gordon gets an idea, and a very simple one at that: fight through John’s psi fuckery and touch him. Whatever it may be past that likeness. And much to Oliver’s credit he refrains from going into what John actually looks like. Whereas Lovecraft describes his horror in exhaustive detail, in an effort to give the reader some impression of the unnamable horror of the week, Oliver goes for a lack of detail. Gordon manages to grab hold of John, and well… the results aren’t pretty. For John, but also for Gordon.

The experience is incredibly traumatizing.

Gordon defeats the alien, but at the cost of his sanity. The experiment is a failure. Mankind’s future of colonizing the planets has died, or at the very least has been postponed. The others are given therapy while Gordon is put in what might be a mental hospital. The cruel irony is that when the Earth ship comes to pick them up months later they do not believe the story with the alien at all; they mistake Gordon’s fears for being spooked by the “meteor” passing over the dome. The log in the equipment room gives far from the full picture. “Odd that a meteor could unnerve a man so!” So the ending is mostly a downer, but then again, much better this than a disingenuous happy ending that doesn’t fit the story’s themes. I guarantee you Oliver would not have been able to stick with this ending had he submitted it to Campbell’s Astounding.

A Step Farther Out

This reminds me of another SF story that’s deeply ambivalent about space travel, and it’s one of the all-time greats at that: Edmond Hamilton’s “What’s It Like Out There?” Oliver’s story is about one step below Hamilton’s, which means it’s damn good instead of a masterpiece, but it’s an eerie and multifaceted tale that works remarkably well as both science fiction and Lovecraftian horror. While he would’ve only been about 25 when he wrote it, Oliver demonstrates a keen sense of cultural shifts, cultural priorities, and mankind’s relationship with a universe which is, in fact, much bigger than himself, never mind that he understands Lovecraftian horror more than most. Given our current values with regards to what constitutes “good” and “important” science fiction, it’s hard to understand why Oliver continues to be an obscure figure. Certainly his best work has aged better than that of certain SF authors from the period who are now more famous.

I’m thinking about the one scholarly article I could find on Oliver, and I don’t think I can link it since you have to log into JSTOR (don’t worry, it’s free) to read it, but you’ll find it right away if you Google Chad Oliver, and you’ll see this title, which justifiably praises Oliver from the outset: “Scientifically Valid and Artistically True.”

See you next time.
Serial Review: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard (Part 2/3)

February 6th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, October 1934.)

Who Goes There?

Looking back on it, many of the most important figures in fantasy are British. J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, and of course we have William Shakespeare, whose fantastical plays (namely The Tempest) are essential to our understanding of the genre, even down to the language we use. As far as American fantasists go, though, few are more important (or more American) than Robert E. Howard, whose life was tragically short but who managed to produce a truly alarming amount of work in that short time. Across a near-endless supply of short fiction and poetry he ventured between low fantasy, horror, and the western, sometimes mixing the three to produce stories that were more invigorating than those written by his fellows. He was arguably the first literary swordsman, although he would probably prefer the position of “barbarian poet.”

Howard ran several series during his brief career, and Conan the Cimmerian was easily the most popular of the bunch, at least with hindsight; it, more than anything else, gave Howard a life after death as scord and sorcery’s key founder. While not Howard’s first sword-and-sorcery hero (or rather anti-hero), Conan was the final synthesis of Howard’s developing philosophy regarding man’s relationship with civilization.

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 of The People of the Black Circle was published in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. You can also read the whole novella (the individual installments are pretty short, totaling about 30,000 words) on Project Gutenberg in a variety of formats. Because this is a Conan story, and one of the more famous ones, you won’t have a hard time finding it at all, be it online or in print.

Enhancing Image

Picking up where we left off, Conan and Yamina are on the run yet again after Conan is accused of murdering an ally of his—an act actually committed by Kemsha, the wizard who, along with his girlfriend Gitara (she has a name now), turned his back on the Black Seers of Yimsha and is now trying to take Yasmina as ransom of his own. Part 1 saw us starting out in the Hyborian equivalent of India, and now we’ve moved towards the equivalent of the Himalayan mountains. You start filling in the blanks once you realize these locales are based on real places.

The romantic/sexual tension between Conan and Yasmina continues to grow when the former proposes that the latter ought to take on the clothes of a local girl so as to disguise herself; after all, at least three parties are looking for her. Conan trades with a local girl and gives her a gold coin for her troubles, although perhaps wisely he sees her running off in the buff rather than giving her Yasmina’s clothes, since if the girl were found with those clothes she could be tortured and, worse yet, Our Heroes™ could be found out. It’s a bit of a comedic scene and it provides some relief after what amounted to a prolonged chase sequence in the first installment. It’s also here that Yasmina’s attraction to Conan is written more overtly, and it turns out such attraction may not be one-sided: when Conan gives her the new robes he beckons her to change out of his sight—an unusually chivalric and modest move for the barbarian.

A little gripe to shove in here before we get to the big action set piece of this installment. I’ve said before that Howard tends to use the same words to describe things when a perfectly fine alternative doesn’t present itself immediately, like Howard is in a mad dash to get the words out and has to go with what comes to mind first. For example, I feel like there has to be a better word to describe an attractive woman’s spine than “supple.” Actually Howard throws the word “supple” at several body parts, and it only works occasionally. This is a small price to pay for writing that is, far more often than not, narratively adept. Howard, on top of having a superhuman work ethic, also had a sixth sense for plotting, both in sustaining narrative momentum and also coming up with twists and turns that’ll hold the reader’s attention.

Speaking of which, here’s one now!

Kemsha and Gitara catch up with Conan and Yasmina, quite miraculously considering Kemsha got damn near run over by Conan’s horse at the end of the previous installment, but their reunion is short-lived when the big (i.e., the true) villains of the story make their first in-person appearance. Four of the Black Seers appear out of a dark cloud, above Our Heroes™ and well out of reach, and while we were led to believe the Black Seers meant business before, this is the first time we get to see them.

Howard doesn’t miss here:

The crimson cloud balanced like a spinning top for an instant, whirling in a dazzling sheen on its point. Then without warning it was gone, vanished as a bubble vanishes when burst. There on the ledge stood four men. It was miraculous, incredible, impossible, yet it was true. They were not ghosts or phantoms. They were four tall men, with shaven, vulture-like heads, and black robes that hid their feet. Their hands were concealed by their wide sleeves. They stood in silence, their naked heads nodding slightly in unison. They were facing Khemsa, but behind them Conan felt his own blood turning to ice in his veins. Rising, he backed stealthily away, until he felt the stallion’s shoulder trembling against his back, and the Devi crept into the shelter of his arm. There was no word spoken. Silence hung like a stifling pall.

The Seers are mainly here to get at the one who betrayed them. On the one hand, fair, but also despite being a villain we’ve come to sympathize with Kemsha. Howard has a gift for creating characters who are, if not totally rounded, at least recognizably human; while we haven’t spent that much time with Kemsha and his girl we understand their motives. Surprisingly, Gitara is not a Lady Macbeth figure who bullies Kemsha into taking power so that she can rule vicariously through him; she genuinely cares for him, and he cares for her, which is a connection that is ultimately held to be true, even if what comes next is tragic.

I hate to bring up another blocky quote like this, but I had to copy down some of the confrontation between Kemsha and the Seers as told from Yasmina’s perspective. The wizards have a bit of a Dragon Ball Z standoff, and despite facing off against four wizards more powerful than him, Kemsha is able to hold his ground. We knew he was more powerful than he appeared from he was able to do in Part 1, but this battle of wills is easily the greatest test of Kemsha’s strength, both as a wizard and as a human being. Yasmina, however, being far from a brainless damsel, figures out how Kemsha does not immediately succumb to the Seers, and how he probably is only able to do this with Gitara by his side.

The answer, simply is love.

The reason was the girl that he clutched with the strength of his despair. She was like an anchor to his staggering soul, battered by the waves of those psychic emanations. His weakness was now his strength. His love for the girl, violent and evil though it might be, was yet a tie that bound him to the rest of humanity, providing an earthly leverage for his will, a chain that his inhuman enemies could not break; at least not break through Khemsa.

Unfortunately something has to give. The Seers, similarly to Yasmina, pick up on Kemsha’s love for Gitara as his shield and proceed to use it against him. Redirecting their efforts at Gitara, she unfortunately is not able to withstand their efforts and is thus guided off the mountain’s edge, taking Kemsha with her to their apparent deaths. Again, despite being villains, their downfall is framed as tragic, and such framing works as we feel their loss. With their biggest opponent (who isn’t Conan) out of the way, the Seers snatch up Yasmina and take her to their lair, with Conan getting the fuck away just by the skin of his teeth. If you’ve read a few entries in this series before then you know Conan ain’t scared of shit, except… well, maybe these creepy bald guys. Admittedly a barbarian, while he can punch and slice his way out of most trouble, would probably get ass-blasted by some high-level wizards.

The People of the Black Circle is a later Conan story and it definitely feels like a later entry, on top of being the longest written up to that point. Conan has loved and lost before, and faced off with some pretty scummy bad guys, but the Black Seers actually make the guy retreat and think hard about how he can get his girl back. Of course it’s a hard conflict to spoil since we know in advance that Conan will come out on top somehow, but it’s more a question of how many people have to die for the bad guys to get taken down. Speaking of which, there’s a character who only appeared for a second in Part 1 who makes a big reappearance here, and his crossing paths with Conan may well lead to quite the final battle with the Seers…

There Be Spoilers Here

There is one player I’ve not mentioned till now, and that’s Kerim Shah. He was allies with Kemsha in Part 1 for like five seconds before the latter decided to go rogue, but now that Kemsha is dead (well, not quite yet) it’s up to Kerim Shah to rescuse Yasmina (and by “rescue” we mean capture her for his own ends) with or without Conan’s help. Since Our Hero™ is at his lowest point towards the end of this installment and since all his allies are now either dead or think him a traitor (his own Afghuli henchmen, having thought he killed the glorified redshit from Part 1, are now after him as well), he might do well to enter a temporary truce with Kerim Shah.

The two thus join forces.

What I find entertaining about this arrangement is that Kerim Shah makes no secret of wanting to take Yasmina as ransom; he states clearly that he and Conan have different goals in mind, and that even if they were to defeat the Seers they would still fight over Yasmina. They team up anyway. Kerim Shah might be a mercenary and a bit of a shithead, but he’s nothign compared to the creepy bald guys who spend the final scene of Part 2 subjecting Yasmina to some rather esoteric torture. Hero versus villain? Yawn. Hero teaming up with Villain B to take down Villain A? Now that’s more interesting. Of course what separates Conan from Kerim Shah is that he’s not a dog for bureaucracy and he actually seems to care for Yasmina. Again, Conan is really an anti-hero; he’s the guy we root for because the people he faces off with are always much worse than him.

Oh, and one last thing…

Gitara has fallen to her death, sadly, but for better or worse Kemsha’s death was not as swift. Conan finds Kemsha barely alive, apparently little more than a pile of broken bones, but luckily Kemsha lives long enough to give Conan his magical… girdle? Yeah, I guess you’d call it that. Conan is not a magician at all, but even a tool handed down from a skilled wizard will certainly help him in his inevitable confrontation with the Seers. Then Kemsha finally dies, sort of in a state of grace, broken but not destroyed, his humanity preserved. We actually get a spectrum of villainy with this story, from irredeemably bad (the Seers), to bad pragmatic and cool (Kerim Shah), to kinda bad but also kinda good (Kemsha). Howard has a way with bringing characters to life with relatively few words.

A Step Farther Out

Thing about Conan stories is that, like any other episodic series with a recurring protagonist, we know Conan will get out of this ordeal fine; the question is how and at what cost. Conan is wearing plot armor, but they must’ve run out of stock at the plot armor store because nobody else has it. People are dropping like FLIES! And yet the good news is that the plot is funneling into what looks to be an exciting climax. Will Yasmina make it out okay? Will Conan and Kerim Shah keep to their truce or will there be BETRAYAL? Most importantly, how the FUCK do people run around half-naked or just totally naked fine when we’re in the mountains? I’m pretty it’d be chilly at that elevation. Anyway, stay tuned.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Dancing on Air” by Nancy Kress

February 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Mark Harrison. Asimov’s, July 1993.)

Who Goes There?

Ncany Kress debuted nearly half a century ago (you can actually find her first short stories in Baen-era Galaxy), but despite her longevity she continues to feel like a “modern” author. She’s been a mainstay of Asimov’s Science Fiction for almost as long, being evidently one of Gardner Dozois’s favorites. She was, for a short time, married to fellow SF author Charles Sheffield. My first encounter with Kress was some years back, with her 1984 novella “Trinity,” with combines the SF premise of cloning with a believable and slightly demented human drama. Much more recently I read her Nebula-winning short story “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” which I have to admit I was less impressed with. Ah, but today’s story is a good ‘un.

What I like about Kress is that she seems fond of writing in the novella mode, which (warm take) I would say is the ideal length for SF. Not too long, but just long enough to give a few major characters their due and also give the reader a neat idea. Quite a few of Kress’s novellas have been up for awards, with her 1991 novella “Beggars in Spain” (later turned into a novel) being one of the most acclaimed SF novellas of the ’90s. “Dancing on Air” was itself up for the Hugo and Nebula, and even placed #1 in the Asimov’s Readers’ poll for Best Novella. There’s a good reason for this.

Placing Coordinates

From the July 1993 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted a decent number of times. It appeared in the 1994 edition of Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction. It got a chapbook edition at one point from Tachyon Publications. Then there’s the Nancy Kress collection Beaker’s Dozen. If you’re in a collecting mood there’s The Best of Nancy Kress from Subterrainean Press, a fancy hardcover that goes for, hmm, over $60 on average used. Have fun!

Enhancing Image

We begin with a murder myster of sorts. Two ballet dancers in New York have been found dead in the past month; both cases seemed to be foul play. Aside from being dancers, both women were discovered to have been bioenhanced—their bodies modified artificially (and illegally) so as to make them sturdier and more refined performers, with the latter dancer she had apparently gotten bioenhanced shortly before her death. The head of the New York City Ballet, Anton Privitera, is staunchly anti-bioenhancement; he has a reputation to uphold, which immediately makes him a suspect. I’ll say here and now, though, that if you’re reading “Dancing on Air” with the specific expectation of it being a murder mystery, you’ll probably be disappointed. Luckily for the rest of us, Kress has different aims in mind.

The plot is split in two. First we have a first-person narrative by Susan, a reporter whose teen daughter Deborah is a hopeful in the School of American Ballet, “the juvenile province of Anton Privitera’s kingdom.” Susan is worried about Deborah for a few reasons: she’s been hanging out with Susan’s deadbeat ex-husband, and of more urgent importance, she’s been curious about bioenhancement. The other half of the story is about Caroline, one of the top dancers at the New York City Ballet, practically a living legend in her field, and already looking to be washed out at 26. Caroline, being a star in the dance world and a possible target for these recent murders, is given a bodyguard in the form of Angel, an uplifted dog. Yes, Angel can talk, and it freaks everyone out whenever he does that. Angel is of course bioenhanced, but people don’t think as much about engineering an animal like this. Bioenhancement for humans is a good deal riskier, both in the legality of it and possible unknown effects.

There were several kinds of bioenhancement. All of them were experimental, all of them were illegal in the United States, all of them were constantly in flux as new discoveries were made and rushed onto the European, South American, and Japanese markets. It was a new science, chaotic and contradictory, like physics at the start of the last century, or cancer cures at the start of this one. No bioenhancements had been developed specifically for ballet dancers, who were an insignificant portion of the population. But European dancers submitted to experimental versions, as did American dancers who could travel to Berlin or Copenhagen or Rio for the very expensive privilege of injecting their bodies with tiny, unproven biological “machines.”

Something odd about the Carolina thread is that it’s narrated from Angel’s perspective. Like with Susan it’s first-person narration, but it’s in the present tense, presumably because while he is smarter than the average dog, Angel doesn’t seem to have the concept of time nailed down. He’s also hardwired to only respond to certain commands from Caroline, which Caroline finds out much to her own dismay. Anton and his business manager John Cole, who had Angel uplifted in the first place, are a shady pair.

Anyway…

It’s the ’90s, and while “Dancing on Air” isn’t cyberpunk it does happen to cover one of the hallmarks of that movement. We’re at the point where we’re a good deal past Greg Bear’s “Blood Music” but Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age was still two years off. The technological breakthrough of the story is nanotechnology, and you know what that means…

At first glance it reads like Suspiria but with nanomachines, but while there’s a good amount of suspense for most of the story, it’s far from horror. Rather the suspense comes less from the murder mystery and more from uneasy parental relationships on both ends. Susan tries and fails to reason with Deborah, who seems too caught up in her own childish ambition to see the danger; meanwhile, as Susan investigates the dance academy, and finds out more about Caroline, things don’t look so good for that woman’s personal life. Of course what Susan doesn’t find out is then revealed to us via Angel’s narration, and it’s in these scenes where Caroline is at her most candid. There’s some dramatic irony at play, since we get to know things about each of the two leads that one does not know about the other.

This two-pronged narrative would be more difficult to pull off with a short story, and as a novel there would be the temptation to add an extra subplot, but at about 20,000 words “Dancing on Air” feels just right in terms of how it’s structured. Each thread has what the other lacks, basically. Susan’s plot reads almost like what you’d see in a film noir or police procedural, while Caroline’s plot is more akin to a character study; the scenes with Caroline and Angel are shorter and punchier than Susan’s.

Now, about those nanomachines. Bioenhancement in the story is more or less replacing one’s own cells with these tiny little weirdos. If you’ve read “Blood Music” where, SPOILERS, the scientist who experiments on himself with the nanomachines gets taken over by them, then you can sort of predict the downside of nanotechnology in this story. I won’t get into specifics right now, though, because how exactly Kress decides to show the monkey’s paw curling with the nanomachines is interesting in the context of what amounts to a family drama. Susan’s relationship with her daughter and Caroline’s with her mother are the focal points of the story, not so much the nanomachines; the science-fictional element exists in service of a human narrative that could potentially happen even without anything science-fictional.

One last thing to mention before we get to spoilers (because I don’t think this is much of a spoiler) is that Caroline’s mother, Anna, is terrible. She and Caroline don’t interact for nearly all of the latter’s plot thread, but we run into her from Susan’s perspective and she’s a nasty piece of work. While Anton comes off the most suspicious, Anna is shown to be a crass, selfish, insensitive old woman who doesn’t seem to care about her daughter’s wellbeing. You might be thinking, “Well she can’t be that bad, right?” Oh, just you wait! You’re gonna “love” what happens in the climax.

There Be Spoilers Here

I wish more stories introduced a murder mystery only to use the mystery itself as a red herring. Anton is introduced as an obvious suspect and by extension an obvious red herring, but not only is it not Anton who killed those women, it’s not anyone among the cast that we know either; it’s just some guy. It’s like Kress was misdirecting us with that thread, and I think she did that pretty well, because the mystery was interesting enough, the thread of familial turmoil is not only more interesting but also ultimately more relevant with regards to the technology Kress has given us.

Caroline may have been saved by a crazy murderer, but her dancing career is coming to an end regardless: for reasons she can’t grasp she has been underperforming horribly as of late, with critics taking note. Unbeknownst to herself (at first), Caroline is an experiment. Dancers are routinely tested for bioenhancement (bioenhancement seeming having replaced steroids for dancers and other athletic types in-story), and it’d be easy enough to do because you could compare the original cells to the nanomachines. It’s here that Kress brings in a rather scary question: What if there were no original cells to compare the nanomachines to? Adults have been known to get bioenhanced, but what about children? Or, even scarier, what about fetuses? It would be possible to experiment on fetuses meant to be aborted anyway, but what if these fetuses… weren’t?

Am I the only one who’s reminded of Greg Egan right now?

Upon attending a science conference in Paris that’s supposed to reveal some crucial info about bioenhancement, Susan finds out two things: bioenhancement is basically a death sentence, and also that there were fetuses some three decades ago who were subjected to bioenhancement in vitro, with some still walking around as adults. One of the scientists who was set to make this public announcement killed himself right before the conference, apparently out of guilt.

Caroline Olson, Deborah said, had been fired because she missed rehearsals and performances. The Times had called her last performance “a travesty.” Because her body was eating itself at a genetic level, undetectable by the City Ballet bioscans that assumed you could compare new DNA patterns to the body’s original, which no procedure completely erased. But for Caroline, the original itself had carried the hidden blueprint for destruction. For twenty-six years.

The reason why Carolina tested negative for bioenhancement is because her whole body has been replaced by nanomachines—probably before she had even left the womb. She’s kind of a cyborg if you think about it. It would also explain why her body has become conspicuously fragile as of late despite her age; the nanomachines are slowly eating her body from the inside. Caroline has an expiration date, although when that is exactly is unknown. Her mother, in wanting to create the perfect dancer that she herself could not be, used her daughter like a guinea pig and, unbeknownst to Caroline, gave her a short lifespan. Which sounds monstrous, because it is. Caroline is not happy to hear that her mother has used her like some tool her whole life, so in the climax she orders Angel to KILL THAT BITCH! YEAH! FUCKIN’ GET HER ASS! Which, look, I know it’s supposed to be tragic, but it’s pretty hard to feel sorry for Anna when Angel goes after her.

The ending is bittersweet, although it leans more on being simply a downer. Sure, the murderer had been caught and the world now knows about the risks with bioenhancement. Angel even lives at the end! Albeit minus a leg, on account of Susan’s intervention. But Caroline is institutionalized and Deborah, being too young and ambitious, throws caution to the wind and gets herself bioenhanced. It’s a dumb risk to take, but as Susan points out, in her bitterness, ballet dancers tend to wreck their bodies in pursuit of their art—only not as dramatically as this. Withered knees. Hip replacements. Arthritis. Why not bioenhancement, the new cancer of the digital age? The pain may be worth it, if it means being perfect for a few years…

A Step Farther Out

“Dancing on Air” is a two-pronged family drama, and pretty good family drama at that. The nanotechnology at the heart of the story causes issues, but ultimately the problem is a people problem. The technology is science fiction but the human anguish is not. Ultimately it’s a story about abuse; it’s about parents forcing their wills on their children, with cruel and horrible results. Susan, Caroline, and the others aren’t perfect, but they (except for Caroline’s mother) remain sympathetic because their desires are sympathetic. The narrative of parental abuse may hit home for some people, but for others (like me) it’s an effective allegory about the uneasy partnership between science and artistry. The ending is more bitter than sweet, but Kress is never less than humane with this outing.

And of course, Angel is a good boy.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: February 2023

February 1st, 2023
(Cover by Joe Tillotson. Fantastic Adventures, October 1951.)

I have to admit I take really niche pleasure in writing these forecast editorials. I suspect reviewers have a to-read list and just tackle shit when they feel like it, but I myself prefer to plan things out. Funny thing is that aside from these forecasts I don’t have a to-read list, anywhere. All this stuff is either in my noggin or it’s not shown up on my radar yet. Hell, I only started keeping a list of things I did read this year. I’m mostly a spontaneous reader, so let me have this one little bit of scheduled activity.

No gimmicks this month. Well, there is one, but you wouldn’t know it at first glance and I’m not even sure it counts. You see, I have a major soft spot for SF-horror; I love SF, and believe it or not I love horror too with almost equal passion, so what happens when you combine the two? This month’s short stories are crossbreeds of horror and science fiction, one by the most famous horror author of all time, the other by someone whose name probably doesn’t ring a bell but who really deserves more recognition.

Anyway…

No more wasting time, let’s see what’ll be on my plate!

For the serials:
1. The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard. Published in Weird Tales, September to November 1934. Started this last month and now we’re gonna finish it. It’s been a fun ride so far. Howard only wrote about Conan the Cimmerian in the last four years of his life, but like with everything else he wrote a lot of it, and this is one of the longer Conan tales. Due to the episodic nature of the series it’s not necessary to have read previous Conan stories to enjoy this one.
2. Needle by Hal Clement. Published in Astounding Science Fiction, May to June 1949. Clement had already been active for several years, but Needle was his debut novel, and it would be published in book form in 1950. Clement is one of the founding fathers of what we’d call hard SF, with Mission of Gravity especially geing a genre-defining novel, but Needle seems to not fall into that mold; rather it’s one of the earliest known attempts at mixing SF with the mystery genre.
For the novellas:
1. “Dancing on Air” by Nancy Kress. From in the July 1993 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novella (well, Best Novelette for the Hugo, I guess voters were confused). Kress is one of those authors I’ve been meaning to read more of, and I’ve been making progress… slowly. Like all great authors Kress seems very fond of the novella mode, but rather than go for one of her award-winners I’m going for a slightly deeper cut. Just slightly.
2. “Medusa Was a Lady!” by William Tenn. From the October 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures. Tenn is supposedly one of the great comedians in SF from the late ’40s to his semi-retirement from the field in the late ’60s. Unusually for Tenn, “Medusa Was a Lady!” (also reprinted as the lamer-sounding “A Lamp for Medusa”) ventures into fantasy adventure territory. And look, I’m weak for a good cover, and the Joe Tillotson cover shown above convinced me.
For the short stories:
1. “Let Me Live in a House” by Chad Oliver. From the March 1954 issue of Universe Science Fiction. Oliver is one of those forgotten authors who popped up on my radar recently, with this story especially catching my interest. Oliver started young and was one of many authors who rode the wave of ’50s magazine saturation before quieting down circa 1960. While Ursula K. Le Guin is rightly praised for her anthropological SF, Oliver was a major forerunner in that vein.
2. “The Jaunt” by Stephen King. From the June 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Does King need an introduction? Not really. Anyway, an SF Discord (shoutout to Media Death Cult, by the way) I’m in has “The Jaunt” on a list of short stories the group’s covering this month, and it’s one of the few on the list I had not read before in all honesty. Rather than just read and make a few remarks on it, I do believe I’ll give it the fancy long review treatment…
So it’s a short month. Only two serials, two novellas, and two shorts. I have something special in mind for March, but for now I’ll enjoy this calm before the storm. Nothing too gimmicky this month! Just catching up with some authors I’ve been meaning to do that with, plus some horror thrown into the mix—which may or may not be foreshadowing.

Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang

January 31st, 2023

(Cover by Julie Dillon. Uncanny, January-February 2015.)

Who Goes There?

We don’t know a whole lot about Hao Jingfang, although she’s prominent enough to be one of those native Chinese authors to get circulation in the Anglosphere, and even a Hugo! She’s appeared in both Invisible Planets (which is where I had first read “Folding Beijing,” although I remembered basically nothing about it prior to this reread) and Broken Stars, both edited by Ken Liu, both containing stories from native Chinese authors in translation. Her background in economics certainly gives context to today’s story, which unusually for an SF story (even a “modern” one) gives a good deal of thought to not only the practical conditions of a future civilization but also the economic reality of it. The only other Jingfang story I’ve read is “Invisible Planets,” from the aforementioned anthology of the same name. (No, I don’t remember reading that one either.)

“Folding Beijing” is a sort of reprint but not really. It was first published in the February 2014 issue of the Chinese magazine ZUI Found, but did not appear in English (translated by Ken Liu) until the January-February 2015 issue of Uncanny Magazine, and it’s this English version that won Jingfang the Hugo for Best Novelette. At 16,254 words it’s almost long enough to count as a novella, although I can believe its novelette status; despite its wordage it has plot beats that could be adequately covered in a 10,000-word story. I’m not sure if Jingfang’s style is just verbose or if it looks that way as filtered through Liu’s own poetic-leaning style.

Placing Coordinates

You can read “Folding Beijing” free online here. I really should not have to elaborate on that, but then we do have several print options. It appeared in a couple annual best-of anthologies, including Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 and Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 1. Something I’ve noticed, looking through the last few entries in his own best-of series, is that Gardner Dozois was oddly deaf to stuff coming out of Uncanny Magazine, despite that publication quickly gaining traction for its quality. Speaking of which, if you’re in a collecting mood then there’s The Best of Uncanny: you could get a hardcover for a pretty penny or as an ebook if you wanna save money, but my opinion on this deeply political matter is, what’s the point of getting an ebook copy of something that’s clearly meant to be a collector’s item? Finally, as said before, you can find it in Invisible Planets.

Not hard to find at all. What’s your excuse?

Enhancing Image

The stereotype of Asian parents being obsessed with schooling immediately rears its head, and not only that but it drives the plot. Some things just can’t be escaped. Lao Dao is a waste disposal worker in a future Beijing that looks a little… different from how it is nowadays. Just how different we’ll see later. The crux of the issue is that Lao Dao, a single parent with a shitty job, wants to send his adopted daughter Tangtang to kindergarten, which sounds easy enough to basically all of us, except that apparently in the Beijing of the story kindergarten may as well be college. Right off the bat I find this hard to believe, at least as a pale white kid from New Jersey who spent his time at kindergarten literally taking naps. There is sort of a justification for why schooling works the way it does in-story, but we’re not given that until much later and even then it’s a bit of a tough pill. The words “kindergarten” and “tuition” really should not be next to each other.

Lao Dao makes just enough to pay rent, so how he’s going to get his daughter (who, mind you, is an off-screen plot device and not a real character) may require some extra income if you know what I mean. I’m of two minds about the exposition here, because clearly Jingfang thought out the implications of her partly invented society and did what most any good science-fictionist ought to do: take things to their logical conclusion, even if it sounds extreme. The problem is that, like I said earlier, this story could’ve feasibly been a few thousand words shorter, mainly through streamlining the walls of text Jingfang throws at us. Take, for instance, this early bit where we find out just how dire the kindergarten situation is:

Lao Dao’s research on kindergarten tuition had shocked him. For schools with decent reputations, the parents had to show up with their bedrolls and line up a couple of days before registration. The two parents had to take turns so that while one held their place in the line, the other could go to the bathroom or grab a bite to eat. Even after lining up for forty–plus hours, a place wasn’t guaranteed. Those with enough money had already bought up most of the openings for their offspring, so the poorer parents had to endure the line, hoping to grab one of the few remaining spots. Mind you, this was just for decent schools. The really good schools? Forget about lining up—every opportunity was sold off to those with money. Lao Dao didn’t harbor unrealistic hopes, but Tangtang had loved music since she was an eighteen–month–old. Every time she heard music in the streets, her face lit up and she twisted her little body and waved her arms about in a dance. She looked especially cute during those moments. Lao Dao was dazzled as though surrounded by stage lights. No matter how much it cost, he vowed to send Tangtang to a kindergarten that offered music and dance lessons.

The good exposition is giving us an impression as to the class divide in this city, which as we’ll find out is even more of a gulf than we’re initially led to believe; the bad exposition is at the end, those last few sentences about the daughter which we really don’t need to know about. All that matters is that Lao Dao has someone in his life whom he loves and who he has to care for. That Lao Dao might do something illegal so as to provide for someone he cares about is understandable on its own; we don’t need bits of flavor for a character we won’t be getting attached to anyway.

Moving on, Lao Dao meets up with a knowledgable older neighbor who, reluctantly, gives him advice on how to traverse the city for a risky but lucrative gig. See, Lao Dao is in Third Space, the lowest echelon of Beijing and the rank that has quite literally the least time and space to work with. You see, Beijing is not a place that you can just make a round trip for; it’s always locked away in parts depending on which echelon of the city is allowed to use what. I’ll explain how this works in a second, but for now it’s important to know that Lao Dao has a difficult task as messenger, taking a message he had originally gotten from Second Space and taking it to First Space. Getting caught meant imprisonment, but success meant putting his daughter in school. “And the cash, the cash was very real.” Lao Dao had snuck into Second Space just to get the message, so First Space, while it would be more difficult, would be surely possible.

Now is the time for me to explain how this works. Correct if I’m wrong, because the phrasing for this little bit of exposition is confusing (I blame Ken, sorry), but Beijing operates on a 48-hour cycle. First Space gets 24 hours to do whatever it wants, then gets put into drug-induced sleep for the next 24. Second Space gets to be awake from 6am on that second day, when First Space is asleep, to 10pm. Then Third Space comes up at 10pm that second day and goes to sleep at 6am the following day, and then the cycle begins anew. 24 hours, then 16, then a measely eight for Third Space. “Five million enjoyed the use of twenty-four hours, and seventy-five million enjoyed the next twenty-four hours.” Sounds simple enough to get around; Lao Dao just has to break curfew. Well, there is one more complication, and it’s what gives the story its title.

What happens to Beijing every Change (mind the capital C) is hard to describe with words, which doesn’t stop Jingfang/Liu from trying. Imagine if a city was a piece of origami. The city is always compartmentalized; it’s impossible to see or even comprehend the city with all its parts unfolded. It’s an impressive if also nightmare work of architecture wherein the three echelons are segrigated by time and space, with First Space being allowed the most access. Not only does Lao Dao have to sneak past surveillance (which, come to think of it, would be nigh superhuman on its own) but he also has to navigate a city that has literally changed its shape around him. The scene where Beijing changes for the first time is a money shot and the most evocative part of the story; it kinda just peaks right there, which is weird because we’re only about a third into it.

Getting to Second Space would be easy enough, as was getting the message. Quin Tian is willing to pay a huge sum for a message to be sent to Yi Yan, a woman in First Space he is deeply fond of, and twice as much money if Lao Dao can get a message from Yi Yan back to him. Basically, Lao Dao has to go from Third Space, wait a whole 24 hours for First Space to go through its cycle, then meet at Second Space, then wait through Third Space’s cycle before getting to First Space. (Who’s on First Space? Sorry.) If this sounds a little convoluted, don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

There’s a weirdly specific genre of storytelling that may as well have (although it probably didn’t) originated in Italian Neo-Realist films. To indulge my film buff side and drop some of my baggage on you, “Folding Beijing” reminds me more than a little of Bicycle Thieves, which has a very similar premise and sequence of events: a put-upon father has to help his child but is forced to venture outside the law when his livelihood is threatened, with tragic results. See also the much more recent Wendy and Lucy, in which a woman (implied to be homeless) has to choose between taking care of her beloved dog on a shoestring budget and putting her in more capable (i.e., slightly less impoverish) hands. In all three stories money is the driving force of the conflict; without it there would be no plot. “The soul of man under capitalism” is fitting for all three.

Needless to say that the Beijing of the story is not the socialist paradise that certain people desperately want China in the real world to be, and which China in the real world is seemingly averse to bringing about.

There Be Spoilers Here

I’m not terribly interested in recounting events in the latter of the story, so I’ll use much of this space to go on a related tangent. “Folding Beijing” is no doubt a dystopian narrative, which makes it just one more entry in a very long (and honestly tired) line of dystopian science fiction. Dystopian SF is, to my mind, the most overexposed and overrated subgenre of SF; it really can be quite tiresome with how much it’s read in schools and how much water it holds in the popular consciousness. 1984 is a more respected (and itself overrated) work of literature than the genre it belongs to. If SF wants to be taken seriously by naysayers and academics it’s all but required to come packaged in a box which reads “DYSTOPIA” instead of “AMAZON.” The Last of Us (both the video game and the TV show) is taken seriously seemingly on the basis that it’s dystopian SF, therefore it’s serious SF. The world presented is dogshit (i.e., worse than ours), therefore we respect it.

Anyway…

Something I’ve realized is that it’s impossible to write dystopian fiction without also writing self-criticism. There’s no such thing as writing a dystopian SF where the society presented has absolutely nothing to do with the society the authors lives in, where the society presented can’t possibly be an “if this goes on” scenario. George Orwell wrote 1984 in reaction to Stalinisn, yes, but he also wrote it because he feared the UK devolving into (more) authoritarian capitalism and becoming akin to that other country he loathed very much. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in reaction to the creeping ubiquity of technology in people’s lives which (he thought) would choke off intellectualism and freedom of expression. (The prominence of television, then-newfangled tech, in the novel and how it relates to characters losing their capacity to think actively, should tell you where Bradbury is coming from.) Similarly to Fahrenheit 451, “Folding Beijing” is basically an anti-technology narrative.

Now, when we call someone a luddite, we use as shorthand for the “old man shakes fist at cloud” meme, but when I call Jingfang a luddite, I’m using it in the proper sense. There are two sides to the robot debate with regards to human employment: the first side says that automation will free people to do as they please and indulge in creative endeavors they otherwise might not have been able to; the second side raises the question of, “What would happen if you had millions of people only really fit for unskilled labor who one day found that unskilled labor taken over by automation?” Jingfang very much falls on the latter side. Beijing is a city of about 80 million people where a sizable portion of those people don’t have work to do and there’s very little room for upward mobility. A good fraction of the population works in waste disposal because that’s basically the only job they can do; meanwhile a small fraction reaps the benefits.

And even the human-driven waste disposal is in jeopardy of being replaced.

Rather than free people to live the lives they want, automation has helped create an incredibly rigid class system in which the rich use the city as a playground and dump their waste on those who (quite literally) live on the other side. And yet, while Lao Dao’s experience in First Space is traumatizing, there is a ray-of-hope ending, with him not getting thrown in jail and even bringing home some money for his daughter—albeit not the amount he had originally sought. Personally I found the ending unsatisfying, if only because by the time we get to it Jingfang has thrown so much exposition at us that the plot starts feeling like a sideshow. She does a lot telling rather than showing, whether it be someone projectile vomiting exposition at Lao Dao or the reader being subjected to chunky paragraphs of characters telling their life stories—characters who, mind you, appear once and never again. This is a short story and not a novella, sure, but it’s bloated.

A Step Farther Out

“Folding Beijing” winning the Hugo when it did must not have seemed like coincidence, given that Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem in its English translation also won the Hugo the previous year. If SF in the 2010s was defined by anything (aside from, ya know, the Sad Puppies and that whole debacle) it’s the rise of Chinese SF in the Anglosphere. I reckon “Folding Beijing” appealed to voters because it has a robust human interest plot that’s buoyed by an admittedly pretty neat idea, but the important thing is that said pretty neat idea is not just there to look cool in the reader’s mind: it illustrates the story’s central conceit effectively. That it’s also outwardly ambivalent about China’s future (i.e., that China will only become more of a hyper-capitalist shithole under the current regime) probably didn’t hurt. As for myself, I’ve seen this sort of thing done many times before, and more concisely, even if I agree with Jingfang’s conceit.

See you next time.