Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Short Story Review: “Mousetrap” by Andre Norton

March 13th, 2024

(Cover by Kirberger. F&SF, June 1954.)

Who Goes There?

For readers of a certain generation, Robert Heinlein’s juveniles got them into science fiction at an early age; for others (and indeed the two are by no means mutually exclusive), it was Andre Norton. Born Alice Mary Norton, she had her name changed legally to Andre Alice Norton when she started to write in the ’30s, although she didn’t make her SFF debut until 1947. She also sometimes wrote under the pseudonym “Andrew North.” With a career that spans more than half a century, Norton was incredibly prolific, with her Witch World series alone probably taking up a whole shelf or two. Along with the likes of Fritz Leiber and Poul Anderson she made an impression writing both science fiction and fantasy.

I’ll be the first to admit I have not yet read any of Norton’s novels, and have only read a few of her short stories. Funnily enough, for how much she wrote overall, Norton wrote comparitively little short fiction, and even less of it appeared in the magazines. “Mousetrap” is a very short Martian odyssey from Norton, so fittingly I won’t be keeping you long with this review. It’s one of those vignettes that carries a nasty little sting in its tail. It’s also the kind of soft SF that easily found a home in F&SF‘s pages in the ’50s—not fantasy, but not something to think seriously about.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Some of Norton’s work has fallen into the public domain, but “Mousetrap” has not. You can find it in The Many Worlds of Andre Norton, The Book of Andre Norton (same collection, different title), Wizards’ Worlds, and The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy (ed. Garyn G. Roberts). Oh, and it was included in The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume Two (ed. Frederik Pohl).

Enhancing Image

Mars has become like a wonderland for explorers, for several reasons, but a big one is we know we’re not alone in the universe. People haven’t found talking aliens exactly, but they’ve found the petrified bodies of alien creatures, “sand monsters,” that stand in the desert, encased with some details of their anatomy hidden. Only problem is taking one of these monsters to some research center. The monsters, “which can withstand the dust storms, the extremes of desert cold and heat, crumble away if so much as a human finger tip is poked into their ribs.” The bright side is being able to hold one of these monsters together means big money. (Bit of an aside, but I would have to go digging for an earlier usage of “Space Marines.” I’m sure this is not the first time, but mind you this was before “military SF” was even a concept.) Enter our three main characters: the narrator, Sam Levatts, and Len Collins. Sam is a local drunk, but he’s courageous, and he knows more about these monsters than the average person. Thus Operation Mousetrap, an effort to nab one of these monsters, is underway.

Some days ago by and the expedition Sam and Len go on doesn’t turn out well. Sam shows the narrator a picture he had taken of one particular sand monster: what appears to be a humanoid woman, with wings. Is she is a human mutant or some humanoid alien we don’t know about? Impossible to tell, but the narrator admits she’s lovely; unfortunately she’s also dust now. Len, in an effort to secure the winged woman, had destroyed her. This is important to remember, since does set up a certain action Sam takes at the story’s end. It also raises a question: Where do these monsters come from? They seem to be of different species, possibly not native to Mars, yet you can barely find anything in the desert, let along a secret civilization of humanoid aliens. Norton implies a lot while saying little. As the narrator says, “the desert dry lands haven’t been one quarter explored,” and similarly “Mousetrap” is a very short (I would say 3,000 words or less) story leaves much territory unexplored. This is not necessarily a bad thing: while the narrative of the narrator and the explorers is self-contained, with a neat twist ending, the setting is vast. There’s not much worldbuilding you can cram into such a small space, but Norton manages.

Something else that stuck out to me was Norton’s style, which struck me as overtly masculine—with a little twist or two in there. Boucher and McComas are upfront in their introduction in calling Norton a woman, which is important because this was still early in her career and people were still prone to thinking “Andre” was a man. I forget if it was a review the came out the same year as “Mousetrap” or a year later, but P. Schuyler Miller, in writing about one of Norton’s anthologies, apologizes for having misgendered her previously. What a nice guy. Still, this is a deeply masculine narrative: there aren’t any female characters with lines, and as the narrator points out, the few women who have come to Mars tend to not be much to look at. Yet the female monster Sam is obsessed with is practically deified, and perhaps more tellingly, her femininity is deified, her body sporting “the distinctly graceful curves we have come to associate with the stronger half of the race.” In old literautre I’m so used to women being called the “fairer” or “weaker” sex that I had to reread this passage to make sure I got the narrator’s remark right. For the narrator it’s perhaps a moment of self-deprication, but Norton it feels like an ironic stattement.

And as we find out in the short span of this story, men do seem to be (at least in some ways) the weaker sex in Norton’s world. Sam is a drunkard, Len is a manipulator, and the narrator is maybe a little too content to stay in his bar (the Flame Bird), away from the adventure of the desert. The winged woman, a symbol (at least for Sam) of feminine perfection, is undone by a man’s touch, and so much be avenged. The title takes on a double meaning as the petrified monsters aren’t the only things being trapped. It’s not exactly a funny story (ultimately it’s a dramatic tale of revenge), but it’s written with a biting irony Boucher and McComas would’ve liked; of anything it reminds me of a minor Henry Kuttner story.

There Be Spoilers Here

I mentioned earlier there is certainly alien life on Mars, although it doesn’t have to be humanoid or even something with limbs. Sometimes it’s just a little green lump—a blob—that looks harmless to the uninitiated. Sam knows these parts better than Len and decides to use this to his advantage. Appatently, aliens of all shapes and sizes have gone through the desert and come across these green blobs, maybe even touched them out of curiosity. The blob turns Len into “a featureless anthropoidic figure of reddish stuff,” like the winged woman in the picture, and Sam uses Len’s own gooing equipment to stabilize the petrified Len. Sam is so cold in basically killing a man that the narrator is too stupified to object—and anyway, he might get a bit of the profit. The natives of Mars, though looking harmless, have a very strange defense mechanism. I had to reread the last page or so to understand fully what happened here (it is maybe too brief for its own good), but I’d be lying if I said Norton’s “solution” to the problem of the sand monsters wasn’t inventive. The introduction’s comparison to Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” makes sense, if only because the conclusion feels like something Weinbaum would’ve imagined.

A Step Farther Out

Not much to say about this one, other than I admire Norton’s ability to imply a future world while also showing very little of it. The Mars of “Mousetrap” feels fleshed-out despite the fact that this is a one-off story that’s only half a dozen pages long. We’ll never return to this setting again, yet it seems like part of a much larger universe. It’s almost like Norton had a talent for such things, hence why she mostly wrote series.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Silken-Swift” by Theodore Sturgeon

March 10th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, November 1953.)

Who Goes There?

Theodore Sturgeon was, for one or two spans of time, arguably the best American SFF writer in the business. It can be hard to judge Sturgeon’s career as a whole since he had periods of inactivity, and health problems seemed to prevent him from writing much in the last decade or so of his life; but when he was on the ball, he was on it. Unlike most authors in the pulp days, who tended to specialize in SF or fantasy, Sturgeon was great at both, and sometimes his fiction can be hard to categorize. Sadly he never broke into the mainstream like Ray Bradbury, despite some brushes with notoriety, such as his involvement with Star Trek. (His second episode for the original series, “Amok Time,” is one of my favorites.) He is the one who coined Sturgeon’s Law, although it was originally called Sturgeon’s Rule: 90% of science fiction is crud, but then 90% of everything is crud. This rule, however, does not apply to Sturgeon’s own work. He was, for my money, one of the best short story writers of the 20th century.

The ’50s can be thought of as Sturgeon’s heyday, and 1953 especially might’ve shown Sturgeon at the very peak of his powers. We saw his novel More Than Human, often considered his best (though I think the last third is comparatively weak) and which won the International Fantasy Award; and there were such iconic short stories such as “A Saucer of Loneliness” and “The World Well Lost.” “The Silken-Swift” is not as well-known as those stories, likely because it’s fantasy (which has always had an uphill battle when it comes to short fiction) and a more demanding read. It’s totally possible to read “The Silken-Swift” casually and not understand what’s happening at first. This is Sturgeon’s writing at its most controlled and layered, and unsurprisingly he would later regard it as one of his personal favorites. He wrote it as basically a fairy tale for adults, and it was such a success that it’s still one of the best of its kind. This is a Sturgeon who has reached full maturity as both a person and artist.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. In A Saucer of Loneliness, Paul Williams says this story’s magazine publication happened simultaneously with its inclusion in the Sturgeon collection E Pluribus Unicorn, although ISFDB doesn’t give a publication month for the latter. However, the introduction in F&SF says it precedes the collection by a month, with “The Silken-Swift” being a teaser for E Pluribus Unicorn. Where else has it appeared? Unicorns! (ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois), The Fantasy Hall of Fame (ed. Robert Silverberg), Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer), and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (ed. Tom Shippey), to name a few.

Enhancing Image

The story incorporates a poem not written by Sturgeon, titled “Unicorn.” It was written by Christine Hamilton and seemed to have been unpublished prior to “The Silken-Swift.” Now who is Christine Hamilton, you may ask? I assumed maybe she was one of Sturgeon’s wives or mistresses, but she was actually Sturgeon’s mother, and she was herself a writer, albeit mostly unpublished. It’s cute that Sturgeon would incorporate his mom’s poetry into a story that is ultimately about womanhood—not that Sturgeon considered himself a feminist, as far as I can tell, but he did sometimes write about women’s struggles under patriarchy. He didn’t write about systemic injustice so much as things like hypocrisy and arbitrary restrictions on how women “ought” to live their lives. He seemed to think highly of “The Silken-Swift” among his own works because its theme was (and sadly will probably always be) prescient. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that out of Sturgeon’s heyday, this story might’ve aged the most gracefully.

So, the plot. I won’t get too deep into it, since it’s a dense narrative and there seems to be some confusion (from reactions I’ve seen) as to what actually happens in “The Silken-Swift.” I also had a concussion a few days ago and am still recovering from that, so sadly I won’t be writing about this as much as I would’ve liked. We have three main characters: Rita, a squire’s daughter who lives in a manor; Barbara, a vegetable saleswoman who lives near said manor; and Del, a brash man “whose corded, cabled body was golden-skinned, and whose hair flung challenges back to the sun.” Rita and Barbara live in the Bogs, right outside town, with a “pool of purest water” by the manor; be sure to remember this last part. At the beginning, Del is sort of lured to the manor while the squire himself and the servants have gone out, leaving just Rita, who takes Del in—although not to do with him what he expects. The two have a good time at first, but before Del can get to second base, Rita plays a rather cruel trick on him (she apparently has been toying with witchcraft) by blinding him. Her reasoning is that no man shall have her—that she will remain a virgin so that one day she can catch a unicorn; this is taking teasing to extreme levels, you have to admit.

After Rita’s catch-and-release routine with Del, she kicks him, still blinded, out of the manor, and it’s here that we meet our other female protagonist. It’s also here that Sturgeon does something very strange for a work of prose fiction, although it does tie into the poem at the story’s center: he repeats himself, a whole paragraph, literally word-for-word. We’re introduced to Barbara twice. I had this feeling of recurrence when reading, so I had to copy-paste these two introductions just to see if my brain (which had just been rattled, mind you) was fucking with me.

The first time:

Deep in the Bogs, which were brackish, there was a pool of purest water,
shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspen, cupped by banks of a moss
most marvelously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there were strange
pipings in midsummer. No one ever heard them but a quiet girl whose
beauty was so very contained that none of it showed. Her name was Barbara.

Then the second time:

Deep in the Bogs, which were brackish, there was a pool of purest water,
shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspens, cupped by banks of a moss
most marvelously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there were strange pipings in midsummer. No one ever heard them but a quiet girl whose beauty was so very contained that none of it showed. Her name was Barbara.

This tactic might not work for some people, and it might seem like padding (this is not exactly a long story in the first place), but it fits with what Sturgeon is going for, which is a sort of narrative prose poem. Sturgeon can at times try too hard with his style, but this might be the single best use of poetry (actual poetry on top of poetic prose) in his writing. The setting is definitely medieval fantasy, but aside from the squire’s manor and the elusive unicorn at the heart of the story this feels detached from any one time frame; it doen’t feel like a stereotypical medieval fantasy setting because there’s basically none of the iconography we’ve come to associate with such a setting. The Bogs are a place that could exist, and the three central characters feel like they could be modeled on real people, despite very much fitting into archetypes appropriate for an allegory. “The Silken-Swift” is ultimately an allegory, if a rather indirect one, with a clear message that floats to the surface despite details of the plot being obscured. Simply put, it’s a story that has not aged, which can’t be said for the vast majority of literature, although fantasy does have a much easier time detaching from the circumstances of its making than science fiction.

As for Barbara’s side of the story, this is where people seem to get confused, and admittedly Sturgeon uses some obtuse language to skirt around a horrific event that, if written today, would probably be described in more visceral terms. Something I realized while reading is that Rita and Barbara are like mirror images of each other, to the point where they could be related. They’re similar enough, or at least sound similar enough, that a blinded Del confuses Barbara for Rita; this will turn out to have very bad consequences for Barbara, since Del, having just been kicked out of the manor and not knowing where he is, is out for revenge. Barbara does her best to care for an injured Del (who, as far as she knows, is just a dude who had something bad happen to him), but Del does something. Is it rape? Probably. It happens so quickly and is so indirectly described that you could miss it on a casual reading, which is one gripe I do have with this story (because nothing is perfect): either out of artfulness, getting around censorship, or likely both, Sturgeon’s language can be a little opaque.

Get this:

Once she cried out.

Once she sobbed.

“Now,” he said, “you’ll catch no unicorns. Get away from me.” He
cuffed her.

“You’re mad. You’re sick.” she cried.

“Get away,” he said ominously.

Terrified, she rose. He took the cloak and hurled it after her. It almost
toppled her as she ran away, crying silently.

You might not even know something had happened if you’re not reading carefully; but credit where credit’s due, Sturgeon implies a great deal in just a few lines. If Barbara was a virgin before then she apparently isn’t one now. Del does something pretty heinous, but it’s also hard to gauge how in control of his own actions he is, given he’s evidently still under the effects of Rita’s witchcraft and is so delirious that he thinks Barbara is Rita; but also the fact that he wanted to rape Rita in retaliation for the witchcraft is inexcusable. Barbara becomes a victim of Del’s abuse and, more indirectly, of Rita’s treachery; but despite all this she retains her sense of virtue, which is important to remember. Unicorns have often been treated in mythology as embodiments of purity, and indeed associated with purity; in the case of “The Silken-Swift” this purity is assumed to mean one’s virginity. Sturgeon, however, asks a simple question: What really counts as “pure?” Rita thinks herself pure, but she’s also a major bitch; meanwhile Barbara is the victim of sexual assault, yet is no less “pure” for it.

I wanna say the message of the story (because like all allegories it does have a clear message, for all its indirectness of style) is the one way you could date it, but unfortunately the message is evergreen. Women’s “purity” is still obsessed over in practically every major society you can think of, regardless of how authoritarian or libertarian the society’s governing system is, and regardless of the majority religion. Misogyny is always here, and might always be here on a systemic level. Among the many ways trans women are dehumanized is to frame them as sex-hungry monsters who prey on “innocent” cisgender women; and of course there’s no such thing as a “pure” trans person, because if you “violate” gender norms then you have already lost that claim to purity. (Never mind that a truly horrifying number of genderqueer people are victims of sexual assault.) Even some liberal-minded people feel threatened somehow if a women has had “too many” sexual partners in the past—if they aren’t reserved enough for their current partner. Sturgeon says this is all bullshit, and while yes the implication of sexual assault is not kid-friendly, this really is, in its subject matter and complexity, a fairy tale “for grown-ups,” as Sturgeon said of it many years later.

There Be Spoilers Here

I don’t even wanna get into spoilers, honestly.

Read it for yourself.

A Step Farther Out

Earlier in my review I said “The Silken-Swift” has not aged, which is not the same thing as saying a work of literature has aged gracefully. Most literature, indeed most great literature, is firmly rooted in the circumstances under which it was written, whether it be the author’s personal baggage or societal norms of the time and place. This in itself is no disgrace. Dhalgren could’ve only been written in the late ’60s through the post-burnout ’70s. The Crying of Lot 49 could’ve only been written during that short period in the ’60s following John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the Beatles landing in America, but before the Vietnam War escalated. Even fantasy, which tends to be more timeless than other genres, is not always excempt. The Once and Future King was clearly written in reaction to the horrors of the Great War and, later, World War II. But “The Silken-Swift,” in both its conception and its message, is timeless; you can’t put a date or place on it. Sturgeon, despite being most known for his SF, was really more comfortable as a fantasist, and I think this is a prime example of such talent.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Shout” by Robert Graves

March 6th, 2024

(Cover by George Salter. F&SF, April 1952.)

Who Goes There?

Robert Graves was, like Ernest Hemingway and J. R. R. Tolkien, is a writer whose subject matter of choice is inexptricably linked with having survived the horrors of World War I. His wartime experiences would more or less shape his career as a writer, resulting most tangibly in his first commercial success, his memoir Good-Bye to All That. Also like Hemingway, Graves was a hot mess: his first marriage was a disaster, and he had an intense homosexual relationship (he was a messy bisexual like yours truly) in his youth that did not end well. Then there was the PTSD from his time in the war, which no doubt strained things. He was involved in a sort of love triangle, between his first wife and fellow writer Laura Riding, in the ’20s when he and Riding were still early in their careers. Incidentally (or maybe not), Graves would write “The Shout” during a rather fraught period in his relationsip with Riding. Be sure to put a pin in that one.

Graves considered himself an Artist™, someone who was genuinely interested in the classics, and unlike the vast majority of writers he achieved real commercial success. Good-Bye to All That was popular, but I, Claudius and its sequel Claudius the God became major bestsellers that are still talked about and considered some of the best fiction of the 20th century. Undertandable! These two novels are great, and they are what convinced me to read “The Shout,” which is easily the most famous out of Graves’s relatively small body of short fiction. It even got adapted into a film of the same name, which is decent but which I think loses much of the story’s psychological density; or rather much got lost in translation.

Placing Coordinates

“The Shout” was first published in 1929 as a chapbook. It was reprinted in the April 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has the unusual honor of appearing in F&SF twice, the second time being in the May 1959 issue, which you can find here. Prior to its first F&SF appearance it saw book publication in the Graves collection Occupation: Writer. It’s been anthologized quite a few times over the years, but seems to have gone scarce recently.

Enhancing Image

An unnamed narrator visits an asylum and has a chat with Charles Crossley, who we’re told is highly intelligent but has one or two delusions. Immediately we know something is up because Crossley thinks he was arrested for the murders of three people, and as we find much later on he recounts these happening; but apparently they didn’t. Or did they? The other delusion, “which is more humorous,” is that he thinks his soul has been broken into four pieces. How did this happen? How did he get thrown into a mental hospital? Crossley is all too happy to tell us, and about a certain couple who, not coincidentally, the narrator is friends with. In fact all three partiers know each other. Most of the story is Crossley’s monologuing to the narrator, and this is important to remember because Graves is gonna play some tricks on us. Unreliable narrators get brought up constantly in literature classes, and Crossley is a good example.

Through Crossley’s narration we’re introduced to Richard and Rachel, and right away I was weirded out a bit because Rachel is my therapist’s name. Anyway, they’re pretty comfortable with each other, married in sort of the European sense (they admit having crushes on other people, but never actually commit adultery), to the point where they discuss their dreams with each other regularly. The latest one is a doozy, not least because somehow they both the same dream at the same time. “We not only live together and talk together and sleep together, but it seems we now even dream together,” Richard says wistfully, although the dream will turn out to be foreboding. A man with a black handkerchief wanders the sand dunes on the outskirts of town, and this man turns out to be Crossley in the waking world. Richard and Crossley meet after church one day and, after tormenting some kids, Crossley wedges his way into the couple’s lives. He’s charming, and yet also uncanny. He claims to have spent eighteen years in the Australian outback, hanging out with the indigenous population, and in that time learning a few tricks—the biggest of these being a “terror shout.” One degree of it will drive you mad, another will kill you.

Crossley claims to have used the shout before, but Richard is skeptical. Rachel, not so much. In a sense you’ve seen this plot before: strange outsider reeks havoc on the lives of an unassming middle-upper class family, no doubt the author saying something about class or sexuality or whatever. If you’ve seen Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem, or more recently Saltburn, you can guess the trajectory of the plot—only you would still be wrong to a degree. I think the love triangle aspect, in which Crossley inevitably cucks Richard and keeps Rachel to himself (though she later claims she was just joshing), is the least interesting part of it, it does make sense when you consider Graves’s chaotic love life at the time. He admitted to seeing himself as Richard in the triangle, with Laura Riding presumably being the inspiration for Crossley. Curious that the woman in the real-world equation is replaced with a man. The tension between Richard and Crossley is certainly not what you would think of as between two straight men, although maybe I’m projecting Graves’s queerness here. Richard’s interest in getting a demonstration of Crossley’s shout could be thought of as like a man propositioning another man for a sexual act. Richard surviving the shout (he puts wax in his ears ahead of time, unbeknownst to Crossley) marks the turning point of the story, but it also serves as a point of no return—as if Richard and Crossley have had sex by some strange proxy, and indeed it’s here that the story becomes hard to decipher.

So about the stones. There are stones scattered across the sand dunes, which Richard finds may not just be ordinary stones. Following the shout, he picks up a stone and it’s like his mind is suddenly filled with information he couldn’t possibly have known before. “He began to think about shoemaking, a trade of which he had known nothing, but now every trick was familiar to him.” He tosses the stone out of fright and just like that, his knowledge of shoemaking leaves him. Things get even weirder when he later talks with the town shoemaker and the other man recalls the sensation of having been thrown suddenly by some unseen force. If what Richard suspect is right then every person in town is connected with a stone in the sand dunes, as if each person’s soul were not in their own body but kept away in these inanimate objects. This means Richard and Rachel have their own stones that their souls are linked to, and maybe the same can be said of Crossley. This reads as insane, if taken literally, but remember that Crossley is now telling us this as someone whose stone has been broken into pieces. The stone breaking could be a metaphor for severe mental trauma, which Graves would know a thing or two about. I know a few people whose personalities have fractured from PTSD, and when understood that way Crossley’s case does not seem as outlandish. But still, it’s surreal.

There Be Spoilers Here

Cucking Richard is good a good idea, especially if he finds the stone your soul is connected to. Crossley loses his mind and is promptly arrested for having killed three people in Australia—only we know he wasn’t arrested. At the asylum, Crossley suddenly loses it again and threatens to use the shout when a doctor detains him—and then something very weird happens. A storm kicks up and the narrator narrowly survives what seems to be a burst of lightning that touches down, killing both Crossley and the doctor. It’s unclear if the shout is what killed the doctor or the lightning bolt, since he’s found with his fingers in his ears. Did Crossley somehow conjure lightning or was it a hell of a coincidence? But then we get to the weirdest part. The narrator meets up with Richard and Rachel (the real couple, divorced from Crossley’s perspective), and they react with horror to the doctor dying (they knew him) but barely react to Crossley dying. They claim to have met him only once, casually, as he was putting on a magic show. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Crossley did not have intimate knowledge of the couple like he claimed to have.

Normally this would be where such a story would end, but Graves gives us one last little mindfuck of a line that I’ve been thinking about since then. Rachel says that Richard didn’t like Crossley’s magic show, and Richard (again, the real Richard) says, “‘No, I couldn’t stand the way he looked at you all the time.” Last line of the story and we’re left with a lingering quetion or two. How much was Crossley making up? Did more happen between the three of them than the couple at the end are letting on? Is Richard more prone to jealousy than Crossley made him out to be? Certainly it would be insecure of him to be hung up on how a stage magician looked at his wife. It’s impossible to say because we don’t meet the real Richard and Rachel until the very end and they only have a couple lines; at the same time those lines are telling. Crossley claimed Rachel visited him at the asylum but at the end the two don’t seem to have ever met him past the one time, unless we take Richard’s “all the time” remark to imply it wasn’t just the one time—that they really were intimate with each other. It’s intentionally confusing, and obviously that won’t sit well with all readers, but I’m a sucker for this kind of literary mind game.

A Step Farther Out

On the one hand I’m not sure how effective this story is as horror. The shout itself is not exactly scary (it’s even less scary in the movie, but that might a problem of trying to do it justice visually), and the supernatural element is more confusing than frightening. On the other hand, I’ve thought a lot about this story over the past few days. From a literary perspective, when trying to take in all the ambiguities (not to mention observations on mental illness) Graves packed into such a small space, it’s almost a masterpiece. I think it’s fascinating. It’s a good example of F&SF reprinting material by mainstream authors that fit in with the magazine’s MO.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Listening Child” by Margaret St. Clair

March 3rd, 2024

(Cover by Chesley Bonestell. F&SF, December 1950.)

Who Goes There?

I like Margaret St. Clair. I think out of the many authors who were filling up the genre SF market in the ’50s she was in the top tier, or at least the next best. But you know how it goes, with women who were prolific short story writers in the ’50s: she got out of it. After 1960 she turned mostly to novel-writing, and not prolifically at that. Not that St. Clair owed readers anything, but it’s a shame that there was sort of a vacuum of good female writers in the field for much of the ’60s. St. Clair was so good that she was two of the best women writing at the time, as she published work under her own name as well as the pseudonym Idris Seabright. The conventional narrative is that St. Clair would submit her pulpier stories under her own name whilst reserving the slicker stuff for Seabright. “The Listening Child” is one such example of a genre story that can be hard to categorize, and was in fact the first published under the Seabright name.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1950 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted three times: in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction (ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas), in Young Mutants (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), and in the collection The Best of Margaret St. Clair. There’s also A Compendium of Margaret St. Clair, but that’s only an e-book so I hesitate to count it. (I don’t like e-books, sorry.)

Enhancing Image

Edwin Hoppler is 63 and wracked with a heart condition that leaves him bedridden for much of the day. He lives in a boardinghouse, with the only people he talks to regularly being the older but much more spritely Mrs. Dean and her grandson Timmy. A case of scarlet fever as an infant left Timmy a deaf mute; he presumably knows ASL but is still learning to read people’s lips. There is something else about Timmy: he seems to be able to sense things that haven’t happened yet That’s So Raven-style. One day a dog gets run over right outide the boardinghouse, but as Hoppler is observing Timmy he notices that the boy seemed to react to the dog getting hit before it happened. “Timmy hadn’t heard the dog’s yelps, the cries, when they occurred. Had he, somehow, heard them ahead of time? It was beyond belief. But it had looked like that.” In a sense the boy was “listening” to things that were about to happen—more specifically bad things, which Hoppler, being understandably worried about his own mortality, considers taking advantage of, hanging out with the boy and whatnot.

Newbery Medal material.

This was, I suppose, back when an old man who is not a relative could be left in the same room with a child for long periods of time and nobody would think it suspicious. Jokes aside, the budding friendship between Hoppler and Timmy is cute, not least because at first Hoppler is disturbed by what he thinks is the boy’s secret power. In a different story, even a St. Clair story in a darker hue, Timmy would be a weird little creep; but here, he is more or less innocent, free of even implied character flaws. Maybe it could be that we’ve seen this archetype way too many times since then, but I felt jaded with the whole “baby Jesus figure” routine. Timmy is not really a character so much as he’s an object of fascination for Hoppler (but not in a creepy way!) and an outlet for him to ponder his own lot in life. The only other “character” is Mrs. Dean, who exists as a foil to Hoppler, being older (or so he believes) but being much more grateful for the life she’s been given. There’s something wrong with Hoppler’s heart, both medically and metaphorically, and this short (I do mean like ten pages) story sees Hoppler’s heart thaw the more he interacts with Timmy. It’s a robust character arc.

Let’s talk disabilities.

There’s a very long history of able-bodied writers having characters with physical disabilities be constantly angsty over said disabilities. (I myself am angsty, but it’s not because of my partial blindness or scoliosis.) Robert Heinlein of all people was actually better about this than most, although he too occasionally indulged in it (I’m looking at you, Waldo). Thing is, both of the main characters in “The Listening Child” have disabilities: one is basically a walking symbol while the other wallows in worry and self-pity. It’s a story about people wounded by circumstance connecting with each other, but it’s also evidently written by someone who—while meaning well—has probably not interacted with disabled persons a great deal. Now, I’m not a sourpuss who can’t enjoy something if it doesn’t align with my own personal understanding of the world. (I mean come on, one of my favorite authors is Yukio Mishima, who has almost nothing in common with me in terms of worldview.) This is more me saying that, even without racism, sexism, or outdated tech, a story can still show its age.

There Be Spoilers Here

Hoppler recover enough from his condition, thanks to medication, that he decides to take Timmy to the beach. (Again this was apparently something you could do in the ’50s and nobody thought it was weird.) Unfortunately, Hoppler suffers an attack and, fumbling for his meds, realizes he had misplaced them. “With desperate incredulity Hoppler remembered that he had meant to move the bottle and hadn’t. It was in his other coat, at home, in the closet.” By all rights this should be the end for Hoppler, but then something pretty strange happens: having sensed before that Hoppler was about to die, Timmy decided to give up his own life, choosing to drown in the ocean if it meant saving the old man. Hoppler sees Timmy gets engulfed by the waves, and as this happens the horrible weight on his chest lightens; he seems to have been cured of his condition, but at the cost of the boy’s life. The ending is a bittersweet one, as the friendship ends tragically but Hoppler is given a new lease on life.

If there was an award for killing fictional children then St. Clair would certainly be in the running.

Now, there is a question that was tumbling through my head as I was reading this story: What genre is it? Because its inclusion in Young Mutants would make you think it’s SF, but while Timmy’s deafness is said to have been from scarlet fever, his precognitive ability lacks an explanation. You could argue losing his sense of hearing as a baby gave Timmy some ESP somehow, but this is grasping at straws; if there’s a connection made, St. Clair does not make it explicit. Timmy’s power to predict the future is treated as magical, and if anything the ending confirms for me that this is a work of fantasy, since Timmy’s ability to heal Hoppler at the cost of his own life implies a supernatural force at work. I would even say the ending makes no sense if taken as SF, but works fine enough as supernatural fantasy. The fact that I had to think what label to even put on this story, though, tells me St. Clair was not thinking actively of labels when she was writing it—that the story itself took much higher priority than what kind of story it would be. This fast-and-loose approach to genre suited F&SF well, especially as the magazine was still forging its own identity.

A Step Farther Out

It’s slick and certainly heartfelt, although I think St. Clair would become more ambitious under the Seabright name quite soon. It does, however, work very convincingly as an early example of what kind of magazine F&SF was trying to be and how it was differentiating itself from its peers. You could show “The Listening Child” to someone without any real genre experience or even interest and they wouldn’t think it unusual. This also shows St. Clair’s willingness to blur genre boundaries and focus on the human angle of a story. I think it’s good, but not great.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: March 2024

March 1st, 2024
(Cover by Stanley Meltzoff. F&SF, May 1955.)

Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas wanted to start a fantasy magazine in the mid-’40s, but couldn’t get it greenlit until the decade was about to end. They both were perfectly qualified for such an endeavor, at a time when the SFF magazine boom was still a year or two off: Boucher was an accomplished author and book reviewer while McComas had just co-edited what was, at the time, the definitive SF anthology with Adventures in Time and Space. According to Lawrence E. Spivak’s (F&SF‘s initial publisher) introduction in the inaugural issue, The Magazine of Fantasy would try to encompass the whole breadth of fantasy, “from the thrilling to the chilling, from the comic to the cosmic,” providing a safe haven for what must’ve at the time seemed like the endangered species that was short fantasy fiction. Unlike Weird Tales, which leaned towards horror, and Unknown, which leaned towards the comedic, The Magazine of Fantasy would take a jack-of-all-trades approach with what material was accepted.

Of course, It would only stay “just” a fantasy magazine for the first issue. From the Winter-Spring 1950 issue onward it would be the magazine we now know and love, incorporating SF and fantasy of almost every flavor. But just because the editors caved and hopped on the SF bandwagon doesn’t mean F&SF was any less unique than before; on the contrary, it remained the only SFF magazine of its kind in the ’50s, and even today it stands out as arguably the most progressive outlet in the field thanks to the efforts of current editor Sheree Renée Thomas. Indeed for most of its life F&SF has had a left-leaning mindset, with Boucher and McComas making it clear from day one that they would go out of their way to encourage women who were trying to make it in what was up to that point a thoroughly male-dominated market. When it came time for picking what stories by which authors I should cover this month, it would’ve been easy to have an entirely all-women lineup, given contributors to F&SF in the Boucher/McComas years: Zenna Henderson, Rosel George Brown, Miriam Allen deFord, Mildred Clingerman, Judith Merril, and the list keeps going.

F&SF turns 75 this year; it is the second oldest SFF magazine still active, only behind Analog Science Fiction. Whereas Analog intentionally appeals to an older and more hard-nosed sect of genre readership, however, F&SF is remarkable for its ability to change its colors chameleon-like with the times, and even being ahead of its time on occasion. It would be a fool’s errand to cover fiction from the whole span of F&SF‘s existence, so I decided to devote March, July, and October to the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively. As such, for this month, we’re looking at a small sample of what was published during the Boucher/McComas years, then during Boucher’s solo tenure, and finally the beginning of a short but very fruitful period with Robert P. Mills’s editorship. Something that really made F&SF stand above its contemporaries was its sense of dignity, being a digest with artsy and at times abstract covers that managed to snag authors from outside the genre SFF market. You have Shirley Jackson, who was definitely a genre author but who very rarely went outside the “slick” markets; and you have Robert Graves, who was totally outside the field but who would appear (with reprints) a few times in F&SF. I think I’ve said enough now; let’s get to it.

For the short stories:
1. “The Listening Child” by Margaret St. Clair. From the December 1950 issue. I covered St. Clair not long ago, although if I’m being honest I was in the midst of a horrible time in my life (long story), and thus I think she deserves another go now that I’m (for the moment) in a healthier state of mind. “The Listening Child” was the first published under St. Clair’s “Idris Seabright” pseudonym.
2. “The Shout” by Robert Graves. From the April 1952 issue. First published in 1929. The early years of F&SF were defined in part by its reprints, so I felt obligated to pick one. It helps that I had read I, Claudius and Claudius the God recently and loved them. “The Shout” sees Graves going for supernatural horror, published the same year as his star-making memoir Good-Bye to All That.
3. “The Silken-Swift” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the November 1953 issue. Sturgeon is one of my favorite writers; in terms of the short story I think he rivals Hemingway and Cheever. Nobody in the field at the time had a bigger heart, and impressively he hopped between SF, fantasy, and horror. “The Silken-Swift” is from Sturgeon during his peak era, and is also said to be one of his own favorites.
4. “Mousetrap” by Andre Norton. From the June 1954 issue. Readers of a certain age will tell you they got into SF by reading Heinlein’s juveniles, Norton’s, or both. Norton is one of the most prolific writers in the field’s history, with her Witch World series alone taking up a whole shelf or two. Strange thing is she wrote relatively little short fiction, and even less of it appeared in the magazines.
5. “Free Dirt” by Charles Beaumont. From the May 1955 issue. Beaumont was one of the best horror and fantasy writers of the ’50s and early ’60s, and would’ve kept at it had he not died of a horrific brain disease at 38. He was the third most prolific writer on The Twilight Zone, behind Richard Matheson and, of course, Rod Serling. He also had a movie review column in F&SF around this time.
6. “Steel” by Richard Matheson. From the May 1956 issue. Speaking of which, Matheson is a personal favorite of mine, and unlike Beaumont he did live (indeed a very long time) to see some degree of mainstream recognition. He’ll always be most famous for I Am Legend, but I’ll always think of him first as a short story writer and screenwriter. “Steel” was itself turned into a Twilight Zone episode.
7. “MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie” by C. M. Kornbluth. From the July 1957 issue. Like Beaumont, Kornbluth died way too young, but he also got a lot of work done in the short time he had. He’s most known for The Space Merchants, written with Frederik Pohl, but for my money he was a better short story writer than novelist. This was one of the last stories of his published in his lifetime.
8. “The Omen” by Shirley Jackson. From the March 1958 issue. Jackson is one of those authors who needs no introduction. She’s one of the most famous American horror writers, and one of the few prior to the ’70s to find success with horror novels more specifically. Sadly she didn’t live to take advantage of the ’70s horror boom. “The Omen” is pretty obscure for Jackson, likely because it’s not horror.
9. “Day at the Beach” by Carol Emshwiller. From the August 1959 issue. Wife of artist and filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, Carol is just as talented as her husband, proving early on she had a knack for the short story. She started in the ’50s and kept writing until her death in 2019. In a case of creatives in a relationship supporting each other, Ed sometimes did art for Carol’s stories, as is the case here.
I think I struck enough of a balance between SF and fantasy with this roster. It’s very tempting to focus only on the SF part of F&SF, but fantasy of various flavors (except sword-and-sorcery, which Boucher and McComas were weirdly deaf to) has always played a part in the magazine, especially in those early years. Short stories, as opposed to novellas and serials, defined F&SF at the outset, so it also happens to make sense we’re reading nothing but short stories this month.

Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “Reduction in Arms” by Tom Purdom

February 27th, 2024

(Cover by Ronald Walotsky. F&SF, August 1967.)

Who Goes There?

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot to say about Tom Purdom. “Reduction in Arms” is actually my first Purdom story, despite the fact that I’ve been meaning to get around to reading at least a couple of his short stories before this. In this unique case, I decided to consult a certain colleague, Gideon Marcus over at Galactic Journey (which I’m now writing for), since he had known Purdom personally for some years, and he came back with an obituary segment he wrote for the SFWA.

This is not the whole piece, but you get the idea:

Tom was a titan. His career spanned eight decades, putting him among the Top 5 active SF authors in terms of longevity. Moreover, he was ahead of his time, featuring persons of color, positively portrayed queer couples, and polyamory in his SF works… in the early sixties. But most of all, Tom was a mensch of the first order, doing good without tooting his horn. And he was a good friend.

I couldn’t have said it better.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted only once in English, in the anthology International Relations Through Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander). Purdom apparently turned “Reduction in Arms” into a novel in 1971, but that’s only been printed the one time. From what I can tell he had envisioned the short story first and then decided to expand on it.

Enhancing Image

It’s the near future, and the Cold War has simmered down a bit in the wake of the Treaty of ~~Beijing~~ Peking, in which the US and USSR have agreed to keep tabs on each other for the sake of preventing nuclear annihilation. Of course, weapons of mass destruction don’t necessarily have to be nuclear, as the unnamed (to my recollection) narrator tells us that the US government has been tipped off to a possible secret lab in a Russian mental hospital. Lesechko, a scientist and a patient at said mental hospital, is rumored to be experimenting with a “ninety-five plus” virus—a bio-weapon with such a rapid spread that it would kill off 95% of a country’s population before a vaccine could be produced. The few who happen to be immune to such a virus would inherit a land of ruins, and needless to say the Cold War would turn very hot very fast. The narrator works a desk job and as such is in no immediate danger, but his colleagues, namely Weinberg and Prieto, are sent to inspect the mental hostpial.

The aim is to see, by way of inspection and interrogation, if the rumors are true, and if so to stop the experiments. The problem is that the team’s second aim is to preserve the Treaty of Peking, since it’s paramount for arms reduction and there are people on both sides who want the treaty thrown in the garbage—to make the Cold War heat up again. As you can guess, this almost has more in common with John le Carré spy novels than with genre SF conventions, although it does remind me of Algis Budrys’s Who?, which also had an explicit Cold War theme and dealt with the thorny nature of US and USSR relations. Like in Who?, there’s a dilemma at work. The narrator puts the core issue succinctly enough:

We assumed the Russians would deny us access, and we would have to negotiate with them. Before the negotiations began, we had to let them know we would withdraw from the treaty if they destroyed the lab while we were negotiating and tricked us into inspecting real patients. If they wanted to keep the treaty, they could either prove no lab had ever been hidden in the hospital—let their technical staff and ours figure out how—or they could show us the lab and give us all the information Lesechko had obtained.

The setup is very good. There are a couple things holding this story back from being more engaging, though. Let’s talk narrators. We have a first-person passive narrator here, in the sense that he doesn’t really do anything and is only reporting the events of the story after the fact. Now, a first-person passive narrator could work, depending on what type of story you’re telling. One of my favorite narrators in all of literature is in William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, and that guy spends most of the novel telling someone else’s story; but then the thing with Maxwell’s novel is that it’s about the tragedy of not treating someone with empathy at a time when they could really use a helping hand. A passive narrator can work in a story that’s light on action, but the problem is that “Reduction in Arms” is, at its core, an espionage thriller. Such a story requires a sense of urgency and a level of apparent danger that demands the reader’s involvement, and this is all deflated when the narrator is a) not in any danger, and b) writing about these events like he’s writing a not-terribly-interesting memoir. I was not on the edge of my scene when I should’ve been.

Another problem is length, although it’s not the problem I usually have with story length. Purdom had apparently written “Reduction in Arms” as a novelette, then shortened it and submitted, got rejected, then expanded it back to novelette-length. Given the weight of the subject matter, I actually think this story is too short, which you could say is the best negative criticism you can give of something. At 23 magazine pages I think it could’ve easily been double that length and made into a novella. We are introduced to a few interesting characters, Prieto especially with his background in the Cuban Revolution, but there’s little dialogue and we’re not given much time with these characters before everything goes to hell. I can see why Purdom would return to this material and make a novel out of it, because it’s rich as a what-if scenario and a pseudo-historical document. There were a lot of SF stories written during the Cold War that were about the Cold War, especially during its hotter moments (the Bay of Pigs “fiasco” is referenced here), but Purdom’s story feels more plausible than most. Just as importantly, this is not a story that mindlessly demonizes the Soviets.

There Be Spoilers Here

The lab turns out to be real, which would be bad enough, but Prieto also goes rogue and starts on a rampage against security and lab assistants. In a way this is convenient, despite the lives lost, because if the secret lab had just been discovered then the US would have reason enough to back out of the treaty; but with Prieto going against orders and threatening to take off with lab documents, the Soviets have very good reason to cooperate with US agents. The only solution that would satisfy both parties is for Weinberg to get the documents out of Prieto’s hands—by any means necessary. Weinberg is a trained agent, but he’d never actually had to kill anyone before; now he had to kill one of his own countrymen. It’s objectively the right thing to do, but Weinberg has to work himself up to it, and it doesn’t help that Prieto is very skilled gunman. “Whenever people talk about the good of humanity, Tolstoy had said, they are always getting ready to commit a crime.” The resulting shootout ends in Prieto dying and Weinberg narrowly surviving, more importantly with the documents intact. It’s a thrilling climax that could’ve been made better by a change in perspective and more development of the characters who are in the thick of it.

The very end implies that this skirmish over the bio-weapon lab will not be the last such incident, although I couldn’t help but be distracted by the story seemingly ending mid-sentence. I think the ellipses are supposed to be foreboding, but I was more thinking that the story had been cut off before it reached a proper conclusion.

A Step Farther Out

I wanna recommend “Reduction in Arms” more than I do. It’s a great idea for a story that ultimately still feels like a rough draft. In 1967 it might’ve been more impressive, hence it making the cover of the F&SF issue it appeared in. It could also be that I had recently read le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, because I simultaneously felt like I knew where Purdom was coming from and that this Cold War spy fiction deal had been done better. I do wanna give Purdom another chance in the future.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” by Howard Waldrop

February 24th, 2024

(Cover by Gary Freeman. Asimov’s, August 1988.)

Who Goes There?

Howard Waldrop debuted in 1972, apparently one of the last authors to be discovered by John W. Campbell, but he would quickly head off in a very different direction from the house of Analog. Waldrop’s fiction can be russtic and nostalgic, sometimes positing what-if scenarios, most famously in his World Fantasy-winning story “The Ugly Chickens,” an alternate history in which the dodo had not gone extinct in the 17th century. His short fiction is what has secured his legacy, since Waldrop had only put out one solo novel, Them Bones in 1984. In the introductory blurb for today’s story, Gardner Dozois says Waldrop was working on a novel titled I, John Mandeville, but this book never materialized. In an age where authors hopped on novel-writing for that bigger paycheck, or even started out as novelists before moving “down” to short fiction for funzies, Waldrop is one of the few notable SFF authors of his generation who was almost a pure short fiction writer. He death last month has left a hole in the field.

Both readers and writers must’ve really liked “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” since it was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and placed third in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novelette. I also really liked it! I’m surprised I haven’t read more Waldrop since the few stories of his I’ve read have been certified bangers; but then he also wasn’t that prolific a writer, so I ought to savor it. There’s definitely a hint of autobiography with this one, as the narrator is a about a few years younger than Waldrop and is an Austin denizen.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Its quality was immediately noted, as Gardner Dozois would reprint it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection. It then appeared in the Waldrop collections Night of the Cooters and Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader.

Enhancing Image

The plot is simple. “The Class of ’69 was having its twentieth high school reunion.” The story takes place in what would’ve been a very near but decidedly alternate future—a 1989 that’s different from what the year ended up being but otherwise is close enough to reality to be plausible. It’s this near-future element that qualifies the story as SF—that and the ending, although I’ll try not get ahead of myself here. The narrator, Frank Bledsoe, is pushing forty and makes his living as a handyman. “I help people move a lot. In Austin, if you have a pickup, you have friends for life.” Austin. Feels like a Richard Linklater movie. This story is much more about characters and speculation than plot, so pardon me if my reviews sounds a little disjointed. This is a very hard story to spoil. It’s totally possible Frank is a stand-in for Waldrop, but I don’t know enough about Waldrop to make that assessment. There’s less a plot and more a series of reminiscences connecting to a single event—in this case the reunion.

Frank is a passive protagonist: he doesn’t really do anything, which would be a problem if this was an action narrative. Instead it almost reads like autobiography, with a strong dose of self-reflection. I mean why not, it’s been twenty years since he graduated high school. It’s been ten years since I graduated high school, and I’ll be honest, I barely remember anything from that time in my life. I was on the wrestling team, until a leg injury junior year convinced me to quit. I didn’t have my first serious relationsip until about a month before graduating, and that whole thing (three years!) was a mistake (I was immature and I wish I had treated her a lot better than I did). I don’t talk to any of the friends I had in high school. People, Frank included, are able to recall their teen years with crystal clarity, but I just can’t. I was an outcast who was very likely autistic and, as it turns out, someone with bipolar disorder who would go undiagnosed for ten years. Things were very different in 2014. We had a Democrat president who had backed a mass murder campaign in the Middle East, and Taylor Swift was seemingly everywhere in the press and on the radio. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that different. People much older than me have a better sense of time passing.

Part of me wonders if Waldrop had not envisioned “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” as a non-SF story, maybe something he would’ve sold to The New Yorker or somewhere else that probably pays better than Asimov’s. Most of the story barely even registers as speculative, which I can see as a problem for some people. Of course, the reality is that the market for non-genre short fiction is rather small, or at least pales in comparison to the wealth of potential buyers in genre fiction. It’s also totally possible Waldrop started writing with the ending in mind, in which case it’s intentionally designed as a non-SF story that suddenly explodes into something else in the climax. Waldrop has an uncanny ability to evoke the ordinary, slightly altered by an ingredient of his own making. “The Ugly Chickens” could be a literary short story that teachers would make students read in high school, except for the whole dodo thing. “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” could be a literary coming-of-age narrative, like Stephen King’s The Body, if not for the whole aliens-causing-a-blackout bit. This story could be just a middle-aged dude reflecting on years past, but have you heard of this band called Distressed Flag Sale and a gnarly show they wanna put on…?

But then the story is less about Frank and more about the time of his youth, the state the US was in, the future that failed to happen. By his own admission he’s not a very interesting person. “I care a lot. I’m fairly intelligent, and I have a sense of humor. You know, the doormat personality,” he tells us. Thing is, Frank is not unique. Indeed much of the story is him finding that his former comrades have largely moved away from their radical youths and slipped into unassuming lives. This is a story about people who would’ve graduated high school in the late ’60s, about those who would’ve been old enough get drafted into the Vietnam War; in other words, this is a story about boomers. Waldrop seems to be in search of an anwer to a question that pertains to people of his generation: Why are boomers like that? Why does the average boomer seem so tired and reactionary? In a less charitable way of putting it, why is the average boomer a coward? Didn’t these people attend Woodstock? Didn’t they make a ruckus at the 1968 Democratic National Convention? What happened to these people? Why had their fighting spirit gone the way of the dodo? Can’t just be old age. Waldrop implicitly gives us a few answers to this question, by way of illustrating how times changes for the boomers between 1969 and 1989.

For one, not everyone boomer was a hippie—pretty far from it. Pop culture tends to do some funny shit, not the least of it being a tendency to co-opt radical movements of the past. Remember when ultra-capitalist Beyoncé appropriated Black Panther attire? Remember when milquetoast liberal Aaron Sorkin turned the leftist Chicago Seven into a pack of like-minded liberals? People, in “remembering” the hippies of the late ’60s and early ’70s, tend to paint these people as a) not as politically subversive as reality dictates, and b) more popular at the time than was the case. Truth is there were a lot of bootlickers among the youth at that time. One of the more memorable characters in Waldrop’s story is Hoyt Lawton, a classmate who was about as straight-laced as they came and who would go on to be a yuppie. “He won a bunch of money from something like the DAR for a speech he made at a Young Republicans convention on how all hippies needed was a good stiff tour of duty in Vietnam that would show them what America was all about.” There were a lot of Hoyts in the US (there still are, actually), and these people went on to vote for Reagan and “master” the stock market. Donald Trump is one such boomer we all know.

The Democratic National Convention. The moon landing. The Manson murders. Altamont. Kent State. This all happened in a period of two years and basically destroyed hippies’ reputation as a genuinely subversive group working towards the betterment of mankind. The so-called New Left came into conflict with itself. Leftist groups like the Black Panthers were being systematically targeted by the government. War protesters were being arrested. It was a bad time to be an American who was not a bootlicker. Maybe the real eccentrics—those, say, in Austin, who really believed in the cause—were being worn out. The guys in Distressed Flag Sale (now renamed Lizard Level) got arrested on bogus drug charges in 1970 and that forced the band to split up. 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots. The burgeoning queer community was then torn to shreds by AIDS, by the government deliberate ignoring of the virus. AIDS does get brought up in the story, sort of in passing; a shame none of the characters are explicitly queer, feel like that was a missed opportunity. We would not have Pride parades without riots. Queer liberation is inherently distrutful of government. God, imagine the work we could’ve accomplished with the hippies. This is a future that failed to happen, or rather wasn’t allowed to happen.

There Be Spoilers Here

So, that reunion. Distressed Flag Signal play some ’60s classics, but then their frontman drunkenly comes out, saying they’re gonna play a song that nobody would’ve heard—a song that existed only by way of reputation, like a myth. It’s called “Life Is Like That” and was due to be on their upcoming album (which never materialized due to the breakup), called either New Music for the AfterPeople or A Song to Change the World. “It was a great song, man, a great song. […] It was going to change the world we thought. […] We were gonna play it that night, and the world was gonna change, but instead they got us, they got us, man, and we were the ones that got changed, not them.” And then something very strange happens. The song has a hypnotic effect on the crowd, and I don’t mean just in the way good music will make people bump in the club, but it seems to draw the whole building into a frenzy. First a few hundred people, but then it builds—goes beyond the building. A few hundred people dancing turns into a few thousand, people dancing in the streets, people forming conga lines, people feeling a kind of insane euphoria that comes through either great sex, drugs, or a bipolar manic episode. The song does what the band hoped it would: it changes people. A literal infection of music that spreads throiughout the land.

One must imagine them happy, even as they dance until their legs give out. It’s sort of ambiguous as to whether the ending is supposed to be fully good or bittersweet, but still, these people are happy; for some of them it might be sheer happiness for the first time in two decades. It’s an ending that leaps straight into the fantastic, and its inexplicableness and potential meaning boost this story for me.

A Step Farther Out

How much you enjoy this story might depend on how much you’re willing to connect with people of a certain generation—people who, at this point, are starting to die from old age. One reason this could’ve been reprinted only once in the past thirty years is that it’s a story written in the ’80s about the ’80s, and more specifically about people who were old enough in the ’80s to be raising families of their own. And, let’s face it, boomers don’t exactly have a good reputation among millennials and younger people like myself. My simple counterargument is twofold, a) that Waldrop is pretty good at what he does, and b) if we make no attempt to understand previous generations then what hope do we have of not repeating their mistakes? I take an amateur’s interest in the historical context of really any fiction, although it helps if said fiction is good—which this is.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Initiative” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

February 20th, 2024

(Cover by Edward Valigursky. Amazing Stories, May 1959.)

Who Goes There?

From the ’50s until Arkady’s death in 1991, the Strugatsky brothers were almost certainly—along with Stanislaw Lem—the most internationally acclaimed SF writers to come out of the Soviet Union. There are a few reasons for this. No doubt during the Cold War there was a push to translate Soviet fiction that badmouthed practices in that coalition, and usually could get away with it since the censors apparently didn’t pay as much attention to genre fiction as “serious” literature. Even so, the Strugatsky brothers sometimes ran afoul of censors, with their novel The Doomed City being written in 1972 but not published until 1989 as censorship was loosening. Their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic is one of the most famous non-English SF novels of all time, helped by an extremely loose but equally fascinating film adaptation in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

In the introductory blurb, Norman Lobsenz (I think it’s Lobsenz) says “Initiative” is the first Soviet SF story ever to see publication in the SF magazines. This might be true, although I’m not ready to tumble down that particular rabbit hole. I’m not sure whose decision it was, Lobsenz’s, Goldsmith’s, or Rutley’s, but despite giving us a direct translation of the title (“Spontaneous Reflex”) in said blurb, the story itself is named “Initiative.” In fairness “Initiative” does sound better in English than “Spontaneous Reflex,” and basically conveys the same meaning in fewer syllables. “Initiative” was first published in the Russian in 1958, and was one of the Strugatsky brothers’ first published stories.

Placing Coordinates

From the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. Finding reprints for stories in translation can be a bit tricky. For example, “Initiative” was never reprinted in book form—at least under that title. As “Spontaneous Reflex” it was reprinted in what seems to be the same anthology under two different titles, A Visitor from Outer Space and Soviet Science Fiction (editor not credited). As “The Spontaneous Reflex” it appeared in Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction (ed. Yvonne Howell). See what I mean?

Enhancing Image

Urm (“Universally Reacting Mechanism”) is a robot—a metal giant that does not wanna harm anyone, the only problem being that it’s bored. “The Master” has gone away and apparently nobody has been left on-site to watch over Urm and make sure he doesn’t get into any funny business. Suppose you’re a machine with arms and legs, and some capacity to make decisions on your own? You might wanna get a hobby or two. You might even become curious. Urm takes it upon himself to explore what seems to be a nuclear power plant (we’re not given many details), scaring an assistant or two and accidentally getting himself irradiated—which is fine, because Urm is virtually indestructible. He leaves the site “a contaminated and a wiser robot,” news of which the underlings at the plant are quick to bring to Urm’s makers, namely Nikolai Petrovich and Piskunov. (I don’t think we ever get Piskunov’s first name, although the authors felt it necessary to give us Petrovich’s first and last name almost every time.) To make matters worse, this is in Siberia, and there’s a snowstorm going on.

I would be intereted to discuss this story with someone who actually has a background in robotics, since it posits a few questions about artificial intelligence, albeit not very seriously. The Strugatsky brothers are known for having a cynical sense of humor, and at least in this early story their humor reads like a similar-looking branch to Robert Sheckley’s—but not belonging to the same tree. Two comedic voices in genre SF that formed around the same time but totally parallel to each other. But whereas early Sheckley can often be summed up as the man’s folly when inventing or confronted with a scientific revelation (the situation will always get worse, and often it ends very grimly), the Strugatsky brothers are a bit more forgiving. “Initiative” is a comedy of errors, but it’d be more accurate to say it’s a comedy of one error, even if it’s a big one. Piskunov and his team had designed Urm for a specific purpose (we’ll get to that in spoilers), but failed to consider the cognitive limitations of a being that a) practically a newborn, and b) only semi-sentient. It’s less that Urm doesn’t act according to his programming and more that his programming is flawed in ways not predicted.

The human characters don’t really matter here other than as physical stand-ins for man’s hubris; they’re little more than cardboard, and that’s fine because the story compensates in other ways. Urm is pretty interesting as a plausible depiction of a self-aware robot, since unlike Asimov’s robots he’s never overcome with delusions of religious zeal or godhood, nor does he particularly dislike humans. He also, we’re told, doesn’t have a sense of self-preservation, such that a man on the street firing a gun at him in terror doesn’t phase him at all—never mind that it would probably take a literal tank to destroy him. Of course what makes him so special, and why Piskunov is determined to capture him rather than destroy, is his brain, “an extremely complicated and delicate network of germanium and platinum membranes and ferrite.” There’s some debate as to how much Urm’s actions are of his own initiative (ha) and how much it’s him simply reacting to stimulation; after all, “reacting” is part of his name. Like a toddler his absorbs information without actually trying to understand it.

Here we see a somewhat juvenile prototype of what would become a recurring theme for the brothers, that being human cognition and its relationship with ethics. Because Urm had been programmed to take interest in tangible things but not ethics and morals, and because it has no real sense of self past a need for stimulation, it’s not fully sentient. It’s not immoral (it doesn’t even cause that much trouble, ultimately) so much as amoral. The Strugatsky brothers seem to be arguing that it’s not possible to be truly self-aware while also being totally divorced from morality. This is a basic premise, and anyone who ascribes to religious faith, or indeed anyone who leans somewhere on the left politically already knows this; whether they choose to do anything good or constructive with the fact that their capacity to think is linked inextricably with the capacity for moral understanding is a different question. Like any self-proclaimed leftist who indulges in racism, classism, misogyny, or transphobia, Urm runs into a problem because there’s a connection not being made in his thinking—although in fairness to Urm this is because the connection can’t be made.

There Be Spoilers Here

With the help of some construction equipment the crew are able to trap Urm and have him turned off, and nobody even had to die to make this happen! It’s also here that we’re finally told why such a robot would be invented in the first place. “Initiative” takes place not far in the future (everything is recognizably “modern”), but enough in the future that it’s clear the Space Race is in full swing. Makes sense: this story was published in Russia about a year after Sputnik. Unlike way too many American SF stories of the time (and until about the ’70s, it turns out), the scientists here got the bright idea to send robots to probe planets in the solar system instead of humans. Urm was made of very tough stuff because he’s supposed to set foot on Venus at some point; this was before it became known to everyone that Venus is too inhospitable a place, even for specially armored robots like Urm. You could date this story, from it being obviously written in the early days of the Space Race, but ultimately the Strugatsky brothers are more interested in thought experiments immerging from the tech than the tech itself—as tends to be the case with good science fiction.

A Step Farther Out

I liked it, and unlike early Sheckley there’s a good deal to chew on here despite the comedic tone. (I like Sheckley, but if we’re being totally honest, once you’ve read a few early Sheckley storie you can predict where they’re going.) This is still much smaller in scale than the intellectual big game the brothers would be hunting a decade or so down the road, but it marks the beginning of what would be a very fruitful creative friendship. That the brothers almost always worked together, what with Boris only writing two novels after Arkady died despite outliving him by two decades, shows a fluidity of style and work ethic. If you were an American genre reader and had picked up the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories, the prospect of reading a Soviet SF story in translation would’ve been novel, but it also would’ve presented a story that was a bit more cerebral than what American genre readers at the time would’ve expected.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “The Storms of Windhaven” by Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin

February 17th, 2024

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Analog, May 1975.)

Who Goes There?

Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin were baby-faced new writers, part of the post-New Wave era, and were even nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (Tuttle won) the same year. The two were lovers in the early ’70s, and while I haven’t looked into this, I’m pretty sure they were still together when they were writing “The Storms of Windhaven” (although they had broken up, and Martin was on his way to getting married, by the time it was published). This was probably the first thing of Tuttle’s a lot of people had read, and this might still be the case given the Martin connection; but these people would be in for a nasty surprise, since Tuttle’s writing is much more in touch with horror than SF. As for Martin, I need not elaborate, only to say that the Martin of the ’70s and ’80s is quite a different beast from one of the most famous authors in the world. I can’t call myself a Martin fan (because I’ve been unimpressed by what little I’ve read of A Song of Ice and Fire), but I do like most of his early stuff.

Tuttle and Martin came up with the Windhaven setting and apparently wanted to turn it into a novel, but only after they had written this first novella, which is a self-contained narrative. And why not? It would take almost five years for a follow-up to “The Storms of Windhaven.” This was pretty popular too, getting nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and placing first in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novella. I like it a good deal myself, for the worldbuilding more than the actual plot, and because it lacks some of Martin’s less savory habits. I have a theory or two about who wrote what, but I’ll get to that in a minute. And rest assured we’ll eventually tackle One-Wing, the much-anticipated sequel to this story.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1975 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is on Luminist. Unsurprisingly most of its reprints predate Windhaven. We’ve got The Best Science Fiction of the Year 5 (ed. Terry Carr) and The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF (ed. Arthur W. Saha and Donald Wollheim). Windhaven itself is still in print, for obvious reasons.

Enhancing Image

The plot itself is rather simple, but some context is needed. A sloppy reading of this story might make one think it’s fantasy, and certainly without some pieces of backstory it could be construed for fantasy. I myself barely noticed the origin of the humans of Windhaven on my first reading, along with a couple other things. Windhaven is a livable but not totally hospitable planet, mostly covered with water and prone to fierce gales and some pretty nasty local wildlife. The humans are descendants of space colonists, who had crash landed on the planet and could no longer use their spaceship; and apparently as a result the descendants have most lost touch with their far-future past, having descended into barbarism. There are basically two types of people: flyers and “land-bound.” The flyers have constructed their wings out of metal from the crashed spaceship, so needless to say it’s a precious resource; losing wings is considered just as bad, if not worse, than losing a human life. I’m putting this all up at the front since Tuttle and Martin sort of sneak in this context in breadcrumbs of exposition, which can be easily missed, although you don’t need it to understand the plot.

Anyway. Our Heroine™, Maris, is a skilled flyer; the problem is that she’s not “supposed” to be a flyer. She’s the daughter of a fisherman (long dead) who got adopted by Russ, who really is a flyer, although having lost the use of one of his hands he can no longer fly, and at the time he was seemingly sterile. “He and his wife had taken her in when it seemed that he would never father a child of his own to inherit the wings.” Luckily for Russ but unluckily for Maris, a child was eventually born. Coll is Russ’s son and, having turned thirteen, Coll has now come of age to inherit his father’s wings. But Russ had previously told Maris that she would inherit his wings! Conflict is now well underway. This is made worse by the fact that flyer laws state that wings can only be passed on to family members (unless the flyer has no next of kin or gives up their wings), preferably blood-related. The Landsman, a local authority, sympathizes with Maris’s wish to become a flyer, but rules are rules and Russ is a traditionalist. To make things even worse, Coll doesn’t really want to become a flyer; he would rather be a balladeer, like Barrion, a mutual friend of theirs and sort of a rebel.

Maris is a bit of a mixed bag as a character, because on the one hand she seems to be one-note: she wants to become a flyer and doesn’t seem to have any other serious aspirations. She has a boyfriend in Dorrel, a flyer himself, but we only see them together in a few scenes and it’s not a relationship that’s made that important. She doesn’t seem to have any hobbies, although in fairness she lives in a world without movies, TV, video games, or even common literature. But, to give some credit, she is driven, has a clear goal in mind, and is not objectified at any point. I suspect that Maris’s assertive characterization came mostly from Tuttle, although I can’t prove this. There’s a bit of steaminess with Maris and Dorrel, but it’s tasteful. Unfortunately one or two of the characters are not written as delicately. Russ is your typical boomer dad who doesn’t approve of his daughter’s wild ways, and he also happens to be very angsty about his disability. Obviously Russ wants to do the sports parent thing and recapture his glory days as a flyer vicariously by forcing his son, who is a square peg, into a round hole. Corm, a senior flyer and the closest the novella has to a villain, is almost a cartoon character, so zealous is he about keeping with tradition.

Unsubtle and at times problematic character writing would dog Martin for the rest of his career (some people will challenge me on this, but I think those people are wrong), but one thing Martin and Tuttle both had nailed down from very early in their careers is a sense of location. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not hard SF, but it is a vivid and plausible (assuming you’re not a stickler for details) planetary adventure that gives us a plot that, yes, could work perfectly fine in a fantasy context, but whose SFnal background gives credibility to this far-future society that has descended somewhat into barbarism. It makes sense that the survivors of a crashed spaceship would scatter over a ton of small islands, traveling by glider or boat, and having to rebuilt society from the ground up. It makes sense that a few centuries later the descendants would remember these original explorers through myth and song, and that lineage would become very important. Balladeers like Barrion would hold an important place in society because they are entertainers, for one, but also they chronicle history—and rewrite it, if need be. Barrion says he’d like to write songs depicting Maris as a virtuous rebel after all has been said and done, and he has the power to do this.

Ultimately this is a story about tradition vs. progress, or more specifically, how we should handle the past. It’s unsubtle; it’s even more unsubtle than the character writing, not that I disagree with Tuttle and Martin’s obvious pro-progress stance. Russ and Corm are bound to tradition, even to the point of making Maris’s life worse, and they need to be shown the error of their ways. This is also a story about racism and classism, by way of metaphor, because it’s pretty clear that a) the people of the different tribes don’t get along too well, and b) flyers and land-bound don’t like each other. Understandable: flyers are rather up their own asses about their wings. Our Heroine™, of course, has no bad intentions and doesn’t even know what those are. She does briefly consider killing Corm when the latter confiscates her wings, but she quickly turns this down, and that’s as dark as her character gets. I’m not really complaining—just pointing out how much of a girlboss Maris is. I don’t remember a great deal from One-Wing but I do remember it focuses a bit less on her, which I might appreciate on a reread. “The Storms of Windhaven” technically has a sequel hook, but it would still feel like a flesh-out world even if we never got a sequel.

There Be Spoilers Here

Maris steals back her wings from Corm, and there’s a chase. Despite being younger and not a “true” flyer, Maris proves to be a better flyer than Corm, which lets her escape his wrath for the moment but also results in her being put on trial before a council. The back end of this novella is weird for me because I totally forgot about the stealing part (despite it being crucial to the plot) and also remembered the trial taking up more of the story than it does. Memory is flexible, and often tells us things that aren’t quite true. I also realized, looking at my notes again, then I occasionally misspelled Corm as “Corn.” Imagine being hunted down by some conservative zealot named Corn. Anyway, the trial is technically to judge whether Maris be exiled from her hometown (or I guess home… rock?), but really it’s supposed to be a kangaroo court of humiliation, as Maris thinks:

Corm is a proud man; I injured his pride. He is a good flyer and I, a fisherman’s daughter, stole his wings and outflew him when he pursued me. Now, to regain his pride, he must humble me in some very public, very grand way. Getting the wings back would not be enough for him. No, everyone, every flyer, must be present to see me humbled and declared an outlaw.

At first everyone is against the notion that wings should be earned in some way rather than just inherited, but naturally Maris is able to convince enough of the council that what has been done for generations isn’t the only correct way to do things. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not some deep “literary” achievement but a well-crafted planetary adventure that wears its thesis and emotions on its sleeve. Its point is obvious, but entertaining to read (there’s not a dull moment here), so unsurprisingly it was quite popular with readers. It’s just a shame that Windhaven, like Dying of the Light and Tuf Voyaging, is doomed to semi-obscurity by virtue of not being the thing that made Martin one of our most famous living authors. Of course, it’s totally possible these books wouldn’t even be in print if not for Martin’s name being attached to them. It’s also a shame that Windhaven would be Martin’s last SF novel if we’re not counting Tuf Voyaging as a novel.

A Step Farther Out

Obvious sequel hook aside, this is a nicely self-contained story that theoretically could’ve stopped here; but it’s a good thing they didn’t. This is a masterclass in worldbuilding, and it’s impressive especially given how young both authors were at the time. It’s vivid, if also old-fashioned even for 1975. It could’ve been published thirty years earlier in Planet Stories, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s justifiably a classic piece of SF adventure writing. We will return to Windhaven, in One-Wing, which was serialized in Analog in 1980. For some reason I remember very little of One-Wing despite having read it not that long ago. Ominous…?

See you next time.
The Observatory: Demon’s Souls Redefined Heroic Fantasy in Gaming

February 15th, 2024

(From Demon’s Souls, the 2020 remake.)

The fact that Dark Souls became a meme a hot minute ago has probably done much to undermine the fact that it’s one of the most important video games to come out of the 2010s. You wouldn’t know this just from looking at sales numbers, but there’s a reason why Elden Ring (the latest in the “franchise,” which is really more a coalition of games developed by FromSoftware with shared elements of a certain design philosophy) is one of the highet selling games of all time. There’s also a reason why the Soulsborne (a portmanteau of Dark Souls and Bloodborne) games have such a devoted (at times rabid and frankly annoying) fanbase. I’m gonna make some people feel very old when I say that when Dark Souls came out thirteen years ago it came to a lot of people as a revelation; it came as such a tidal wave that it forever changed how people understand action RPGs, or even what it means to make a genuinely challenging game in an age where big-budget gaming has become increasingly homogenized and “safe.” When it came time to write listicles and thinkpieces about the most important games of the 2010s, Dark Souls was obligated to be part of the conversation.

There’s just one problem: Demon’s Souls already did (albeit with rougher edges) most of what made Dark Souls special.

I remember when Demon’s Souls came out in the US (published here by Atlus, which is very weird to see in a Soulsborne game), and I remember this because I had just gotten my PS3 (I think for Christmas) and Demon’s Souls was one of those games that consistently made best-of-the-year lists, especially for PS3 exclusives. Demon’s Souls came out in Japan in February 2009 and in North America that October; so yeah, it’s fifteen years old now, and I’m sure some people are really feeling their age at this moment. Of course when I played Demon’s Souls for the first time many years ago I couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t even get past the first level, although of course now I can get through both the tutorial and that first level dying maybe once or not at all. One of the things that caught people’s attention with this game at the time was that it was much harder than the average RPG, although in hindsight it’s the shortest and arguably easiest of the Soulsborne games. (I wanna take a second to differentiate Soulsborne from Souls-like, the former being Souls-like games developed by FromSoftware and Souls-like at large being a subspecies of action RPG.) It’s a game that consistently punishes you for rushing head-first into danger.

The difficulty was such a talking point in contemporary reception that it threatened to overshadow all the other ways Demon’s Souls was unlike any other action RPG at the time, and if I went in-depth with every point on such a list we would be here all day. So I’ll stick to what makes Demon’s Souls such a unique game to me in particular, as someone who has played through it a few times with different builds at this point. First off, what is this game even about? One of many precedents Demon’s Souls set for future entries was a near total lack of plot. A scourge has come over the kingdom of Boletaria, brought on by some eldritch horror, and it’s your job as an adventurer to seal away said horror and save what remains of Boletaria. Interestingly your character gets slightly more backstory than in most future Soulsborne games. In Dark Souls and Bloodborne you’re some random shlub who gets picked to save the day, but in Demon’s Souls we’re told at the outset that you’re some brave warrior who has done your fair share of adventuring. This still falls more in line with traditional Western RPGs, wherein your character is a blank slate (bonus points if you have a case of magical amnesia), as opposed to JRPGs, wherein your character (or characters more often) has a personality, backstory, and even a canonical name.

Despite being Japanese-developed, Demon’s Souls is heavily Western-influenced, in both its aesthetics and game design, although there are some mechanics here that seemingly have no predecessor. Boletaria is very much a medieval setting, albeit one that has been made practically vacant due to the scourge. You have a hub level, the Nexus, in which you can level up, buy and store items, and so on; and in the Nexus you have five “archstones” which take you to different parts of Boletaria: Boletarian Palace, Stonefang Tunnel, the Tower of Latria, the Shrine of Storms, and the Valley of Defilement. Each of these archstones has a few levels plus a few bosses, with you only getting a “checkpoint” once you defeat a boss. Unlike most RPGs, including future Soulsborne games, Demon’s Souls doesn’t have an interconnected world or a continuous dungeon but rather is split into sections that the player can tackle mostly in any order. Once you get past the first level of Boletarian Palace (it’s really the second tutorial level after the first one), there’s nothing stopping you from heading to the Shrine of Storms or the Valley of Defilement next. Other than Boletarian Palace’s first level the other archstones’ first levels are similar in difficulty—which is to say difficult.

Most RPGs give you a party to work with, but Demon’s Souls and its kin have you playing a lone wolf—for the most part. The only other Japanese-developed RPGs I can think of that give you only one character are Vagrant Story (an editorial for another day, to be sure), and of course previous FromSoftware RPGs like King’s Field and Shadow Tower. For Western examples you have the Diablo series (if you’re not in multiplayer) and the Ultima series, especially Ultima Underworld. Incidentally Vagrant Story, Shadow Tower, Diablo, and Ultima Underworld are all dungeon-crawlers; and while Demon’s Souls is not a dungeon-crawler, it does take some notes from that kind of action RPG whilst adding a few twists. For one, combat is totally in real time, with the player working with melee weapons, ranged weapons (which I’ve never really used), and offensive magic spells. You also have miracles, which are like spells (if you have high magic then you go for magic, and if you have high faith then you get miracles), but they serve much more of a supporting role. New Soulsborne fans will be surprised by shields actually being quite useful in this game; you could dodge your way out of every attack, if your equip load is light enough, but using a shield to block attacks is perfectly valid here.

Let me tell you a little bit about my most recent playthrough, which sadly I started but could not finish by the time I had to write this editorial. If you wanna know a little bit about how I tend to play RPGs then this will be a useful guide. When playing an RPG, especially Western, I often go for a strength build on my first playthrough, trying to keep combat as close to pure melee as I can. You can tell how well-balanced a game is by how it treats strength builds. You have quite a few classes in Demon’s Souls and a few of them have pretty good strength stats; mind you that magic in this game is kinda broken, so if you wanna play on “easy mode” then I suggest Magician or Royalty. For this playthrough I went with Temple Knight, which has very good strength, endurance, dexterity, and faith, but has low intelligence and an even worse magic stat. Clearly we’re not gonna be casting spells, but we are gonna wanna level up that intelligence since spells and miracles both hinge on that stat. The temple knight is one of the slowest but sturdiest classes, and because you have high endurance you can attack multiple times consecutively. Barbarian has the highest starting strength stat, but Knight and Temple Knight are not far behind.

I named my temple knight Bubbus.

(From Demon’s Souls, 2009.)

Something ingenious Demon’s Souls does at the outset is it makes the tutorial optional, but it also rewards the player for going through it if they can defeat the boss at the end. Defeating Vanguard (the tutorial boss) is very much possible but a first-time player is highly unlikely to do it, in which case you die and get sent to the Nexus (you die regardless, either to Vanguard or Dragon God if you beat the former); but if you beat Vanguard then you get some very good loot that’ll help you in the early game. This is a reward for experienced players. Once you’ve done that, you go to the first level of Boletarian Palace, which is like a more in-depth and much more challenging tutorial. It’s also here that you can farm health items if you’re good enough, which is maybe not to the game’s advantage. Demon’s Souls is short, in that an experienced player can get through it in ten hours or so, but it’s also very exploitable. You have a health item, called grass, and you can stockpile this shit pretty quickly depending on how good you are. There’s also a stupidly broken accessory, the Thief’s Ring, that you can get in that first level pretty easily. And there’s the Cling Ring, which if you will never take off if you’re playing the PS3 version, because…

While Demon’s Souls is relatively easy in the ball-busting world of Souls-likes, it does do some dickish things to the player that even later installments would backpedal on. See, when you die at the end of the tutorial and go to the Nexus, you lose your human body. When you lose your human body you go into soul form, and in soul form you have half your health removed, getting back your human form when you beat bosses. So you wanna get back your human form as fast as possible, right? Not necessarily. Something super-dickish this game in particular has is World Tendency, which on the PS3 version (whose servers shut down years ago) makes the game almost unplayable. Each archstone is subject to this arcane thing called World Tendency, in which the difficulty of a given level can go up or down depending on the color of that archstone’s world tendency. Every time you die as a human, that archstone’s world tendency darkens, and as it darkens enemies will get tougher, and if it gets dark enough the level will spawn black phantoms on top of the normal enemies. You really don’t wanna deal with those black phantoms. In soul form your deaths do no affect World Tendency, so you’re incentivized to stay in soul form with your health cut in half. The Cling Ring brings up your health cap from half to about two thirds, so it’s a big help if you’re in soul form.

In the old days, when the servers were up, you would invade other people’s worlds in order to balance out your own World Tendency, on top of beating bosses; but since the servers are down, if you’re playing the original you’ll have to kill yourself in the Nexus to get into soul form as soon as possible. It’s weird. And about that multiplayer. You can only experience this by playing the remake now, but Demon’s Souls had a truly unique multiplayer that had never been done before and which would become a Soulsborne staple. You don’t play with other players directly, for the most part, but you do get to leave messages in the world and in turn can read messages other players have left behind. You can also read players’ bloodstains to see how they died, which can be useful in situations where there might be a trap or an ambush waiting for you. As for direct confrontations, you can invade other players’ worlds or summon them to your own. You can summon a player if you need help with a boss fight or you can invade to fight another player, primarily to balance World Tendency. Of course you yourself can be summoned or invaded. This was a big fucking deal in 2009, and it helped make a game as desolate as this one seem less lonely.

Said loneliness does have its own charm, though. What keeps bringing me back to Demon’s Souls, despite it not being my favorite Soulsborne game (that would be Bloodborne), is its atmosphere and immersion. “Atmosphere” and “immersion” are tired go-to words when people write about video games, but they’re useful words and sadly we have few options for substitutes. Let’s say, in more dude-ish language, that Demon’s Souls has some immaculate vibes. The archstones are different in their enemy variety and level design, but they also run the gamut from classic medieval fantasy to borderline Lovecraftian horror. My personal favorite, in terms of atmosphere, is the Tower of Latria, in which the game takes on a deeply creepy aura: the Tower is a prison, set many stories aboveground, and when you do get down to the surface it’s a swamp with some of the weirdest-looking enemies in the game. That the game has basically no music outside of the intro and boss fights means the sounds you hear are all diegetic. What seals the deal is that each archstone’s world feels like a real place: Boletarian Palace has you breaking into a castle from the front, and it’s designed such that it feels less game-y and more like a real medieval castle with pathways and defensive measures that make sense. While each archstone’s progression is linear, there’s not too much railroading, and the detours you can make are also practical.

Demon’s Souls, despite being horror-tinged at points, is as close to a straight heroic fantasy adventure as the Soulsbourne series gets; it helps that it has a relatively happy ending for the series. (There is a second, “bad” ending, but you probably wouldn’t even think it’s an option on a blind playthrough, as you have to go out of your way to get it.) You might be the Chosen Undead in Dark Souls or the Tarnished in Elden Ring (the latter, as far as I can tell, being the most heroic in the series since Demon’s Souls), but in Demon’s Souls you play a certified badass who ultimately wants to do good. There’s a bit of moral ambivalence in there (namely with Maiden Astraea, one of the bosses), but the player’s goal is unambiguously good—exemplified by the Maiden in Black, who levels you up, is a total sweetheart, and whom I totally do not have a crush on. You get to save the day, and because this game can be hard as balls for the uninitiated you will feel you’ve earned your keep. But it’s also lonely at the top. There’s a quiet desolation here that none of the other Soulsborne games quite capture, and even the 2020 remake fails to replicate the original’s vibes. If you have a PS3 (my readers are at least in their thirties so I don’t know if you fellas even game much), get a copy of the original Demon’s Souls and see what I’m talking about.