Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

The Observatory: Clark Ashton Smith, Literary Sorcerer

January 15th, 2024

(Clark Ashton Smith, as sketched in the October 1930 issue of Wonder Stories. Artist uncredited.)

It’s the first editorial of the year, and yeah, I know it’s a bit late to be seeing this. Clark Ashton Smith’s birthday is January 13, so a couple days ago. He was born in 1893 in California, and he would more or less live there for the rest of his life. He never ventured too far, and in the ’20s and ’30s he would care for his ailing parents, hence his turning to writing fiction. So the story goes. Smith never gave interviews, and we still don’t have a biography of him, but we do have copious letters he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and others. With only one serious rival (whom I’ll get to), Smith was, for my money, the best line-for-line writer to appear in Weird Tales during its 1930s heyday; and he appeared in that magazine A LOT. Despite being formidable in both quality and quantity, though, Smith is somewhat forgotten today unless you’re a weird fiction enthusiast; certainly he lacks the mainstream recognition of Lovecraft and Howard. You’d be hard-pressed to find Clark Ashton Smith studies in academia and you’d be as hard-pressed to find Clark Ashton Smith fanclubs.

How Smith’s reputation failed to pick up a posthumous second wind like what happened with Lovecraft and Howard is a mystery that has a few clues, but after all it might not even be a mystery. Certainly Smith becoming semi-obscure by the time of his death is the same fate that befalls most authors—those, anyway, who garnered any reputation in the first place. It’s the singing quality of his prose and the striking power of his writing that makes this fate seem unjust, though. This dissonance between his deserving recognition and not getting said recognition was solidified by Smith “winning” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2015, an award reserved for authors whom the folks at Readercon believe to be worthy of recovering from the dust piles of history. Even Lovecraft agrees with me and the Readercon people: he singles out Smith as one living master of weird fiction in his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” It’s funny, because in some ways Lovecraft and Smith were very different, the former zeroing in on a rather niche subgenre of horror while the latter was content to hop across genres if it meant an extra paycheck.

Going back to the beginning, Smith tarted out as a poet; as a teenager he caught the attention of some notable personalities in the local California literary scene, even running into Ambrose Bierce. Smith was an autodidact who accrued an enormous amount of knowledge and even learned a couple extra languages from being a voracious reader. He would read encyclopedias and dictionaries front to back. He read seemingly everything he could get his hands on. Even without a proper education, Smith would come to have a much larger vocabulary than the vast majority of people who read his stories in the pulps, hence his (in)famous prose style. Smith dabbled in short fiction during his early days as a poet, but it was not until the late ’20s that he went full steam ahead on writing short fiction. Smith wrote something like a hundred short stories between 1929 and 1934—enough for a lifetime, compressed into five years. All told, Smith put out more fiction than Lovecraft (who, incidentally, did not write a whole lot during that same period), and he probably matched Howard in productivity for a short time there. He appeared in ten out of twelve issues of Weird Tales in 1934 alone, making him an almost omnipresent force.

Unlike Lovecraft, who turned up his nose at anything he deemed less dignified than Weird Tales (he was apparently cross when August Derleth sold At the Mountains of Madness to Astounding Science Fiction), Smith was not so picky; he would sell to Weird Tales the most, but he also appeared in Wonder Stories, the short-lived Strange Tales, and even Astounding. Of course, given how much he was writing, Smith could not afford to sell to only one outlet. And unlike Lovecraft, who didn’t seem to think of some of his work as science fiction, and Howard, who straight up never wrote science fiction, Smith was fine with playing into the recently founded pulp SF market, hence his appearing in Wonder Stories almost as often as Weird Tales. Smith had created several series, although it would be more accurate to call them settings: Zothique (a far-future wasteland which anticipates Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth), Hyperborea (a prehistoric Earth not dissimilar from Howard’s fantasies), and Averoigne (an alternate medieval France that has been infested with vampires, ghouls, and the like) are the big ones. When not setting his fiction on some fantastically altered Earth, Smith sometimes resorts to picking Mars or some other planet as the venue.

It’s worth mentioning, of course, that while Smith did play to the expectations of pulp readers for the sake of a paycheck, he did not do much to dumb down his language even with his most uncharacteristic work, which must’ve come as a shock to many at the time. The reality is that even many of the “classic” SF stories of the ’30s are semi-literate; they had other redeeming qualities, but you did not go to such fiction expecting to enjoy the prose for its own sake. Those who complain about the lack of literary flashiness in pre-New Wave SF writing would scarely survive a bout with SF as published in the pulps circa 1934. Read a randomly picked Smith story, on the other hand, and you’ll notice two things: you’ll find at least one word you do not recognize, and you’ll probably get swept up in the rhythm of Smith’s style. I’m a highly colloquial writer as opposed to a poetic one, so rather than try to lecture on what makes Smith’s prose different, I’ll simply provide a couple examples. The first is from the most recent story of his I’ve reviewed, “The Door to Saturn.” The wizard Eibon has used a magical door, courtesy of the god Zhothaqquah, to escape a pack of zealots, and upon entering Saturn (Cykranosh) encounters a strange creature:

He turned to see what manner of creature had flung the shadow. This being, he perceived, was not easy to classify, with its ludicrously short legs, its exceedingly elongated arms, and its round, sleepy-looking head that was pendulous from a spherical body, as if it were turning a somnambulistic somersault. But after he had studied it a while and had noted its furriness and somnolent expression, he began to see a vague though inverted likeness to the god Zhothaqquah. And remembering how Zhothaqquah had said that the form assumed by himself on Earth was not altogether that which he had worn in Cykranosh, Eibon now wondered if this entity was not one of Zhothaqquah’s relatives.

The second example is not from a story I’ve reviewed, but one I had read over a year ago which helped make me a Smith fan. This is from “The Dark Eidolon,” one of Smith’s best and most bombastic stories—a real scorcher of a tale, a dark fantasy epic in miniature. The wizard Namirrha, having accrued an unspeakable amount of power in his decades-long quest for revenge, has summoned the literal horses of the apocalypse to decimate the city of Ummaos, reveling in the destruction even as it will likely cost him his own life in the process:

Like a many-turreted storm they came, and it seemed that the world sank gulfward, tilting beneath the weight. Still as a man enchanted into marble, Zotulla stood and beheld the ruining that was wrought on his empire. And closer drew the gigantic stallions, racing with inconceivable speed, and louder was the thundering of their footfalls, that now began to blot the green fields and fruited orchards lying for many miles to the west of Ummaos. And the shadow of the stallions climbed like an evil gloom of eclipse, till it covered Ummaos; and looking up, the emperor saw their eyes halfway between earth and zenith, like baleful suns that glare down from soaring cumuli.

This shit is EPIC.

I wish I had something more sophisticated to say, but Smith’s work at its best conveys a sense of scale and a dark majesty in the span of twenty to forty pages that most novels fail to match up with, let alone other short fantasy stories of the time. Robert E. Howard was unlikely to use “somnolent” and almost certainly never used “somnambulistic,” let alone in combination with “somersault,” achieving the effect Smith pulled here. Lovecraft was also one to pull obscure words out of his ass, but he also never wrote a story featuring (among other things) a revenging sorcerer, an army of giant skeletons, and horses the size of skyscrapers which trample a whole city underfoot; and this is all in the same story! I’m just saying, read “The Dark Eidolon,” it kicks ass. You could say Smith dared to kick ass in a way Lovecraft had no interest in, and which Howard could only match via a different school of writing, that being the propulsion of action writing. Howard thrilled us with tales of musclebound men fighting demons and giant snakes, rescuing damsels and the like, but Smith thrilled us with his use of language. Reading a lumbering Smith paragraph, with its parenthetical asides and protracted sentences chain-linked with semi-colons, peppered with words you might not have ever seen before but whose meaning you can gather from context, can be like reading an incantation in a forbidden spell book. If Howard was a literary swordsman, then Smith was a literary sorcerer.

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, October 1932.)

There is, of course, at least one writer in Weird Tales in the ’30s who I think matched Smith on almost the same wavelength: C. L. Moore. Being nearly twenty years Smith’s junior, Moore was very young when she hit the scene in 1933, but her first professional story, “Shambleau,” was an immediate success, and in just a couple years Moore garnered a reputation as a sort of prose poet, never mind a writer of immense depth. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry is one of the most memorable old-school sword-and-sorcery characters (she should by all rights be as influential as Conan, but sadly she is not), probably a bigger achievement than any of Smith’s characters individually (although Eibon and Maal Dweb are very fun and dastardly sorcerers), and despite her youth she could at times go toe-to-toe with Smith’s poetic strength. Imagine being a Weird Tales reader circa 1934 and seeing both Moore and Smith’s names in an issue’s table of contents. Both of these writers, for the rather brief time they were direct contemporaries, must surely have expanded the language of many readers, and by extension their minds. Moore is another writer who deserves to be popular with modern readers and for some reason is not; but that is a story for a later date.

Aside from being pessimists with a penchant for penning brooding passages, Smith and Moore were also both more open go writing about sex their most of their contemporaries—I don’t mean sex as a source of titillation, but as it pertains to human psychology. Lovecraft was probably asexual, and so avoided the topic when he could, and Howard, while he did sometimes write about erotic love (never mind his attempts at titillating the reader), was not given to jealousy, forbidden lust, and other psychosexual matters. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry experiences a crisis of conscience when she realizes (after she has killed him out of vengeance) that she is profoundly attracted to the man who had sexually assaulted her. Smith’s characters likewise are at times met with these conflicts between mind and flesh. Jealousy and temptation are especially common. I’ve noticed, after reading enough of his fiction, that Smith was fond of using flowers as symbols for two things at the same time: an ideal and tempting beauty, and a horrific malice which lurks under said beauty. For example, in his story “Vulthoom” (review here), the protagonists are met with an eldritch being in the Martian underground who, seemingly in an effort to tempt Our Heroes™ over to its side, takes on the appearance of an androgynous beauty within a massive flower. Much like Smith himself, who was a notorious womanizer (he only married after his sixtieth birthday), characters in Smith’s writing think about sexual attraction, and this thinking-about-sex plays into their psychologies.

Why did Smith never pierce the mainstream consciousness? There are a few reasons for this. For one, the fact that he never wrote a novel in adulthood (he did write one as a teenager, but it was only published decades after his death and I don’t know anyone who cares to read it), does hurt him, as it would anybody. Unfortunately novels have always sold far more than short stories; you’ll find many stories of SFF writers in the ’50s who take up novel-writing in an effort to make that extra cash. Even Howard, who died so young, wrote a novel with The Hour of the Dragon. Another is that while Lovecraft and Howard were very good at writing a certain type of story, Smith is harder to pin down—that is to say it’s harder to come up with a single “encapsulating” Smith story to hand off to some newcomer. Someone curious about Lovecraft would do well to start with “Dagon” or “The Rats in the Walls,” but an unaccustomed reader might find the sheer awesomness of “The Dark Eidolon” or “The Maze of the Enchanter” off-putting. Even when compared to Lovecraft, who by no means was a slacker in the language complexity department, Smith’s prose is positively purple. The truth is that Smith is at his best when his language is at its most pyrotechnic; an “easy-to-read” Smith story is a relatively boring one. Lastly, Smith was not exactly an innovator, nor did he write extensively on the history of weird fiction; as such he was neither a pioneer nor chronicler of the form.

As you know, Smith’s output slowed to a trickle after 1934; once his parents died he no longer had the financial strain that had pushed him to try writing for a living. He could be coaxed to write a short story now and again thereafter, and strictly from a modern perspective it might seem like he actually wrote a decent amount after 1934. He always remained a poet. Being restless as an artist, he would also take to sculpting and illustrating, although his reputation stands on his prose and poetry. Smith died in 1961, having outlived some of his contemporaries by a good margin, but in the context of weird fiction and American fantasy it’s easy to think he had “died” around the same time as Lovecraft and Howard. Much like how Moore’s story as a writer basically came to an end with the death of her first husband, Henry Kuttner, Smith’s winding-down as a writer of some of the darkest and gnarliest (and at times funniest) fantasy can be said to coincide with Weird Tales‘s subtle decline towards the end of the 1930s. Many writers have tried (and a few have even succeeded) to sound like the next H. P. Lovecraft, but I don’t know anyone who has tried to sound like the next Clark Ashton Smith. Maybe he was a sorcerer without an apprentice.
Short Story Review: “Apartness” by Vernor Vinge

January 13th, 2024

(Cover artist not credited. New Worlds, June 1965.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve occasionally covered authors who had meteoric rises such that they garnered reputations only a couple years after entering the field, but Vernor Vinge falls on the opposite end of the spectrum. Vinge debuted in 1965 with the story I’m talking about today, but he would not start to make an impression on the field until his cyberpunk novella “True Names” in 1981, and would not surpass that until A Fire Upon the Deep in 1992. This is all a little pointless to say now, since Vinge (sadly now retired from writing fiction) has long since made his case for being one of the important SF writers in living memory. His Zones of Thought series has one of the most unique and captivating space opera premises. “True Names” was an eerily prescient glimpse at what virtual reality and cybersecurity might entail. He has won five Hugos and is one of the few people to earn the Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement. I like him.

“Apartness” was Vinge’s first published story; he would’ve been all of 19 when he wrote it. Now, tempting as it is to pick on a literal teenager, I wanna be clear that for all its flaws, this is a pretty ambitious story. Here we have a post-apocalypse story that tackles, rather directly, the ramifications of real-world colonialism. It’s a rare genre SF story from the era that tackles race relations without resorting to metaphor. This is a lot to chew on for a 19-year-old, and it hints at an ambition Vinge would take advantage of much later. I recommend it, despite its roughness.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1965 issue of New Worlds, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966 (ed. Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim) and Under African Skies (ed. Gardner Dozois and Mike Resnick). Then of course there’s The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, which is supposed to be a complete volume of Vinge’s short fiction but which does not include a few stories that were published afterward. Somebody should update that maybe.

Enhancing Image

Context matters, so I’m frontloading the review with some of that if you don’t mind. Some three centuries into the future, half the world has gone to shit. The “North World War” was a series of calamities that left the entire northern hemisphere devoid of human life, with only South America, South Africa, and Australia ~~and I guess New Zealand too~~ escaping the carnage; and even then, the survivors were by no means unscathed. South America has since been “unified” by a family line of dictators, resulting in one massive police state. We follow Diego Ribera y Rodrigues, an anthropologist on a seafaring expedition near Antarctica, who has to deal with a cynical captain and a group of government-appointed astrologers, who basically take the place of scientists. What these astrologers could be doing or accomplishing is unclear, but it is clear that Ribera’s only allowed to be here because he has good connections, otherwise “el Presidente Imperial” would be happy with just superstitious busybodies.

Vinge gives us a whole lot of backstory upfront for a short novelette, and right away you might guess how this future world might be unusual for genre SF in 1965. The main characters are, at the very least, not white Americans or Europeans; actually you’d be hard-pressed to find another SF story from the era that has a cast of Hispanics. There’s an African character and another part of the backstory Vinge does not reveal until much later, but we’ll get to that. This is also a rare case in SF of a first contact narrative between two groups of humans; because, you see, the people on the ship find that there are also people in Antarctica. Which is weird. Nobody was supposed to be living here. Now if you know your history then you know first contact between an indigenous people and a more “advanced” group of settlers has always ended badly, and the following encounter runs a similar course. Naturally the people living in the Antarctic are not natice to that land, but it becomes clear they have become accustomed to the harshness of the land and have not been in contact with other human civilizations for a very long time. Delgado, the ship captain, is unimpressed.

Vinge, even as a teenager, understood that for our talk of wanting to see exotic alien worlds, there are places on Earth that are already strange enough, just from their geography and weather. Ribera and his fellow South Americans, accustomed to warmer climate, are taken aback by the stark coldness of the Antarctic landscape—the sheer desolation of it. “The only things that seemed even faintly normal were the brilliant blue sky, and the sun which cast long shadows into the drowned valley; a sun that seemed always at the point of setting even though it had barely risen.” There’s not so much a subgenre as a subspecies of SFF, the lost world tory, that was pretty popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, and which was about civilized (read: white) man venturing into some unmapped corner of the globe and finding lost civilizations, ancient creatures, and so on. Of course, as the surface of the globe became more or less entirely charted, the lost world story faded into antiquity—except for when there’s a twist. “Apartness” is a lost world story with a couple twists: firstly, the explorers are not white, and secondly, the “lost world” is a place that had once been known but, as a result of a quasi-apocalypse, had been forgotten.

As for the people in the Antarctic, they’re not dissimilar from what you’d find in an old lost world story, with a race of ape-people who are semi-civilized but who might also want the explorers for lunch. There’s a big language barrier issue; whatever language the ice people speak it has been isolated from the rest of humanity for a couple centuries. Ribera discovers that the ice people are the survivors of what must’ve been a shipwreck, although what exactly happened will not be revealed until after we have left the Antarctic. There’s certain information Vinge, rather coyly, refrains from giving us, which made me scratch my head whilst reading the story a bit. The structure of the thing is a bit odd. There’s some useful context that’s denied us until after the central action of the narrative. If it seems like I’m trying a little too hard to not jump ahead it’s because the conflict, or rather the question, of the story is a bit foggy without that last piece of the puzzle. And it is a mystery, with who these people are and what civilization they could’ve descended from. “Ribera’s mind returned to the puzzle: where were these people from? How had they gotten here?” You could flesh out this scenario into at least a novella, which Vinge probably should’ve.

There Be Spoilers Here

Things go badly between the groups and Ribera takes a harpoon to the abdomen, which honestly he should not have survived (especially because, by his own admission, there wasn’t much medical help on hand), but a little too miraculously he survives. I know why Vinge did this: because Ribera is our POV character and if he dies then the final scene becomes a dialogue between two characters we knew nothing about previously. I guess that would be worse since it would slightly undermine what ends up being a pretty powerful closer; indeed it’s only here at the end that it becomes clear what point Vinge is trying to make. Hitherto there have been little inklings of what “Apartness” is about, but only with the introduction of Lunama and his subsequent infodump do all the pieces fit. Lunama is a government guy, part of the propaganda wing—and a black African, a proud “Zulunder.” It turns out that, among the other atrocities committed during the North World War, an actual race war erupted in South Africa, with black Africans taking to exterminating the white settlers in the region. On the one hand, that’s a spicy meatball; on the other hand, Vinge at least tries to not play into the (presumably) white reader’s fear of a “white genocide.” If anything there’s the implication that whitey might’ve had it coming, as brutal as that sounds. You don’t read about anti-colonial extremism often in old-timey SF often, especially from a non-reactionary viewpoint.

Ya know, it’s an awkward word, like you would never hear someone use it in a conversation, but “apartness” sure does sound similar to “apartheid.” Vinge is playing an association game with us.

But, as Ribera points out, you can’t entirely wipe out a people with as much power and influence as the white South Africans had. Colonialism always leaves its mark. “The Afrikaners had left a lasting mark, obvious to any unbiased observer; the very name Zulunder, which the present Africans cherished fanatically, was in part a corruption of English.” We also learn that the people in Antarctica are the decendants of white South Africans who, desperate to escape the carnage, escaped on two luxury cruisers, housing a total of some 5,000 people. Ribera, now understanding the why of the situation but also understanding this is a couple hundred years post-race war and genocide, speaks up to convince Lunama that the Antarctic barbarians need not be exterminated, but Lunama makes it clear they’re perfectly happy to leave those people basically alone—cut off from the rest of humanity. The “civilized” man, left without a colonized land and people to exploit, has descended into barbarism. (Incidentally, or maybe not, Ribera calls these runaway white South Africans “aborigines” at one point, which is funnily ironic.) Certainly from a modern perspective this is a spicy meatball, and I’ll be honest, I did not expect someone like Vernor Vinge to make such a point: that the “Afrikaners,” in thinking themselves innately superior to the people they’re exploiting, have deservedly been left to rot in their own “apartness”—their separation from mankind. It doesn’t help, of course, that the richest person in the world (depending on the time of day) is a fascistic and socially inept white South African.

A Step Farther Out

Obviously I wouldn’t recommend “Apartness” as one’s first Vinge, although if you know your SF then you’ve probably read at least some Vinge already. It’s an outlier in his oeuvre, but while it would not cover the same territory as more mature Vinge and indeed has a touch of the amateur, it’s a good time provided you’re a fan who’s curious about a great writer’s early days and/or your interest is piqued by the somewhat unique and thorny material Vinge is playing with. Most authors’ first stories are creaky and unassuming, and while “Apartness” certainly is creaky it is not unassuming; rather it’s an ambitious start for someone—I need remind you—who was a literal teenager at the time. I’m able to give works of literature the proper context when understanding them, so I enjoyed it.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Project Nursemaid” by Judith Merril

January 11th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, October 1955.)

Who Goes There?

Judith Merril was one of the few female members of the Futurians, that New York-based fan group that would have way too many big names among its ranks. She wrote a couple novels in collaboration with fellow Futurian C. M. Kornbluth, but she’s much more known for her short fiction and work as an editor. Her debut story “That Only a Mother” is one of the most reprinted so-called Golden Age SF stories—really too often reprinted at this point. She was never that prolific a writer, and after 1970 she basically took no part in the field; because she quit SF relatively young her work gives the impression of someone who was restless and, by the end of it, more than a little jaded. Her criticism is well worth reading. I’d been meaning to get more into Merril’s fiction (which is not hard, as there’s not a lot of it), but something would always sidetrack me. But no more!

“Project Nursemaid” might be the most Judith Merril story ever, in both its length and how it encapsulates Merril’s mission statement; it shows off what made her unique at the time as well as her weaknesses. When Algis Budrys called Merril the founder of “the steaming-wet-diaper school of SF,” he was probably thinking of this story specifically. For my money, “Project Nursemaid” is a good story that tragically has been stretched too thin, like a delicious gob of peanut butter over too much bread. It took me several days to get through it, partly because I’ve been sick for the past few days (my tonsils rebelling against me) but partly because you start to feel that length. Also sorry this is a day late; these things happen.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has only been reprinted a few times. It was anthologized once, in Six Great Short Science Fiction Novels (ed. Groff Conklin). For Merril collections we have Daughters of Earth: Three Novels and Homecalling and Other Stories: The Complete Solo Short SF of Judith Merril. That last one rolls right off the tongue.

Enhancing Image

The plot is simple. In a distant (although not too distant) future, the “world government” wants to colonize the moon. One problem: you can’t take pregnant women to the moon. You can take a fetus in an incubator, but not a pregnant woman. Thus for Project Nursemaid there are two objectives: to gather enough “Pre Natals” (fetuses) and Foster Parents—those who will raise the young on the moon. ~~Major~~ Colonel Tom Edgerly thus has to find enough would-be mothers who are willing to give up their babies, and even more importantly enough women who are willing to spend a whole year on the moon. The deadlines are strict and the criteria for the women are no less strict. Conveniently Tom is also a trained psychologist, which makes him fit to interview quite a few women in search of those with the right stuff. But, unfortunately, the saying that doctors are bad at taking care of themselves (dentists having bad teeth, for example) holds true here, as Tom will have to answer to some hard truths about himself, and unlike the women who have a psychologist to talk to, Tom’s superiors want results first and foremost. This almost sounds like a recipe for disaster.

And that’s basically it!

Looking at the Mel Hunter cover for this issue of F&SF, I assumed the cover illustrated Merril’s story and thus had to do with robots colonizing the moon; we don’t get robots nor do we ever get to see the moon colonization first-hand. If you’re curious to read an SF story about a robot raising human children on another world then I would recommend Vernor Vinge’s “Long Shot.” Overlooked short story, that one. Anyway, technology doessn’t really play a part in “Project Nursemaid” other than as a point of logistics; the tech is feasible, and arguably not even science-fictional from today’s viewpoint, but Merril discusses (at exhausting length) who might be the right people to get involved with such tech. One could make the argument that “Project Nursemaid” is not even really a science fiction story, but pure speculative fiction. What’s the difference? For my money, it has to do with the role technology plays in the character drama and how essoteric said tech is. Maybe in 1955 using incubators to create moon babies was far-out, but not so much in 2024. More importantly, you could replace the colonization project with some other thing—some totally real-life project, like the space race that was just getting started in 1955—and I’m pretty sure the ensuing character drama would be mostly unchanged.

Let me put it another way: Gravity is certainly speculative fiction, in that it speculatives on a what-if scenario of some freak accident marooning some astronaut on the cusp of Earth’s outer atmosphere, but it’s not really science fiction because the technology is basically arbitrary. Of course the other, equally valid, argument is that something can be SF even if it does not involve the hard sciences—for example if it’s about the soft sciences. I forget who said this (might’ve been P. Schuyler Miller), who argued Theodore Sturgeon’s novel Some of Your Blood still counts as SF, depite scoring zero in the area of technology, because it’s still a novel about a soft science—namely psychology. “Project Nursemaid” is certainly more about psychology, a soft science, than it is about the hard-nosed business of raising a group of people on the moon. What type of woman would willingly give up her baby, and what type of person would be looking for such a woman in the first place? This novella brings up some topics which would’ve been rarely discussed, if not taboo outright, in genre SF at the time, such as abortion and women having sex out of wedlock, and we even get a reference to masturbation, if only in the metaphorical sense.

(Little side note, but I found it amusing that Merril set her story in some alternate timeline where the UN was actually useful, but did not predict Alaska soon becoming a US state. It had been a territory for decades but would not join the Union until 1959.)

Speaking of stuff that would’ve been unusual for ’50s genre SF, we have Tom, who in the hands of a Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov would’ve been a cold, chauvinistic, reason-oriented man who would only do “what needs to be done.” This story would’ve been fundamentally different had it been written by someone preoccupied with the logistics of the project itself, but to its advantage Merril was not. Tom gets to know some of the women he interview, and even has romantic tension with one (Ceil, a tough-minded unmarried woman barely out of high school), though the latter comes about not because there’s some romantic tension quota to meet but because it’s implied Tom is a deeply lonely person. Much is made about how women in genre SF have historically drawn the short stick, being often written without interiority or much of a sense of agency; but just as important is that the men in genre SF, especially in the early decades, often lacked interiority as well. Tom, unlike most of the male leads in other stories of the time, has a rich inner life, with palpable internal conflict. This richness of Tom’s character remains something to admire, even when “Project Nursemaid” (as it does sometimes) becomes nothing but people talking.

There Be Spoilers Here

(This is the part where I would be discussing late-game plot developments, but for one, I feel like roadkill and can barely bring myself to type these words; and another is that this novella has a rather amorphous plot structure. I’m afraid you’ll just have to use your imagination for this part and come up with my possible response, assuming you’ve already read this story. I actually considered skipping this review altogether but I figure I at least owe you an impression of what I took away from this story.)

A Step Farther Out

I was surprised by how little I had to say about this one. You can blame it on the illness, but also it did take me four days to get through “Project Nursemaid,” by the end of which I was… tired. There’s some fun with realistic speculation on moon colonization, plus Tom being kind of a unique male protagonist in genre SF at the time, but this is still seventy pages of mostly people talking in rooms. I can get invested in people talking in rooms under the right circumstances, and with enough zeal on the writer’s part, but there are chunks where “Project Nursemaid” spins its wheels more than anything. No doubt I’ll look back on this review and feel bad about it, and give Merril a more fair shot, but be aware this was about the best I could do whilst sick for the better part of a week now. Apologies.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” by Algis Budrys

January 6th, 2024

(Cover by Dember. Galaxy, December 1961.)

Who Goes There?

A famous and well-worn “takedown” of criticism, usually said by artists who are deeply insecure about their craft, is that critics aren’t artists, or if they’re artists then they don’t have the talent to match the art they’re criticizing. “If you can’t do something yourself then why criticize it?” sounds reasonable until you realize nobody would be able to criticize a bad piece of woodwork unless they’ve worked in carpentry, or nobody would be able to criticize the comfortability of a pair of shoes unless they’re a shoemaker. I’m getting a bit sidetracked. Thing is, Algis Budrys is a notable response to this non-criticism because he is one of the few people in the history of genre SF to ssucceed as a writer, critic, and editor. He started off as a very promising short story writer (debuting the same year as Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley, the early ’50s were insane), before showing as much success with novels, and then mostly moving away from fiction in the ’60s in favor of criticism. Budry’s writing didn’t always live up to his own standards, but one can’t doubt he helped raise literary standards in genre SF.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted a decent number of times. Where to start? The Tenth Galaxy Reader (ed. Frederik Pohl), Alpha Two (ed. Robert Silverberg), Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, and Frederik Pohl), and The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg). There’s also the Budrys collection Blood and Burning. This is all well and good, but “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” has apparently fallen out of copyright; you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Rufus Sollenar is the current head of the Sollenar Corporation and the new owner of EmpaVid, a machine that’s set to push TV to the next level. However, as Ermine, an advisor from the International Association of Broadcasters, informs Our Anti-Hero™, there’s trouble on the horizon. Sollenar’s long-time competitor, Cortwright Burr, has been in talks with the Martians about a machine that might outcompete EmpaVid if put on the market but whose properties Ermine is super-vague about; in fairness to the man he doesn’t really know what Burr is up to. The point is that if Burr’s machine is what Ermine thinks it is then the IAB (who are basically a board of investors) will ditch Sollenar in favor of Burr. Sollenar, being a totally reasonable businessman, decides to take matters into his own hands, i.e., to kill Burr and steal the mystery machine for himself; this will turn out to have tragic and very strange consequences.

If it seems like I’m frontloading this review with more synopsis straight from the tap than usual, it’s because Budrys frontloads his story with exposition—only it’s not as straightforward as that. There’s some context that would be helpful that Budrys, for some reason, refrains from telling us. In the first few pages we’re told that this is set at some point in the future, sometime after 1998, and that the Martians, “a dying race” (when are they not), are trading with human civilization like it’s no big thing. This raises some questions that go unanswered, and while this may be so because these questions are not strictly plot-relevant, the answers would add some background flavor the story is otherwise lacking. We know basically nothing about Sollenar aside from his having inherited a powerful company and that he seems used to always getting his way; again, this is all the plot needs to work, but it is unfortunately lacking in character. We arguably learn more about Ermine, who is deliberately made out to be sort of an enigma, than Our Anti-Hero™, and I don’t think Budrys intended this.

I don’t usually say this with regards to length, but “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” could stand to be a couple thousand words longer. ISFDB says it’s a novelette, and while I haven’t run the Gutenberg text through a word processor I’d wager it just barely reaches the 7,500-word mark. Even taking the exposition into account the pacing on this thing is lightning-quick, and not strictly to its benefit. I’m pretty sure Budrys would get on my case for saying this, but this story reads like a pastiche of Dick’s early work: the pacing, the sense of irony, and most importantly the playing with the line between reality and illusion. Once Sollenar fails to kill Burr (so he thinks) the story descends into borderline horror of the surreal kind, which would almost feel more at home in the pages of Weird Tales than Galaxy—if only Weird Tales were still around in 1960. The science-fictional element could easily be replaced with fantasy anyway, and might even work better in that context. Sure, Budrys wrote a story about the future of TV, but that’s an obstacle that can be easily overcome; and anyway who says a fantasy setting can’t have a bit of electricity. The machine the Martians gave Burr, which is now in Sollenar’s possession, may as well be magic. Unfortunately the only American fantasy outlet when Budrys had at that time was Fantastic, which did not pay so well.

This is not to say it’s a bad story. It reads very well, Budrys has a fluency with English that would not give the impression it’s his second language, the pacing (like I said) is fast as a whip, and there is a weird strangeness that one doesn’t normally see in SF of this vintage. Burr is not really a character so much as a ghost that haunts Sollenar, mute, silently judging, looking “like a corpse. Or worse.” Worse yet, after trying to kill Burr, Sollenar is now on the IAB’s shit list; not only might he lose his business but he might also lose his skin. Ermine plays the role of the strictly rational bystander here—so blocked off from emotion that he had all his nerve endings severed so that he literally can’t feel anything. We thus are dealing with a literal zombie and a man who, while not dead, has all the feeling of a corpse. The enjoyment in reading this story comes from watching a not very good person enter a downward spiral as a result of his actions. We’re told, even from the introductory blurb, that Sollenar is likely to meet a bad end; how he meets that end is the real question. It’s a twisty and rather morbid tale that would arguably have benefited from Budrys giving it more time in the oven.

There Be Spoilers Here

Turns out Burr really did die, but—probably because he knew Sollenar had it out for his—decided to give his competitor one last fuck-you in the form of the machine the Martians had given him. The machine, we learn much later, creates what amounts to a waking dream for the auditor, which can be used on the person with the machine or on someone else. The results of such a machine would be unspeakably disastrous, considering the user can basically induce hallucinations in other people, and I’m not sure why the Martians built such a machine in the first place, let alone are willing to sell it to humans. Burr has in fact been dead for most of the story, but he induced a continuing hallucination in Sollenar such that he torments him from beyond the grave. This indirectly leads to Sollenar’s death at the hands of Ermine, but in what I suppose is a moment of grace he uses the machine to give Ermine the illusion of his senses having returned. Sollenar knows the IAB will have him assassinated no matter what at this point, so why not give his assassin a farewell gift.

That has to count for something.

A Step Farther Out

It could be that for personal reasons I’ve been experiencing some gnarly sleep depravation (we’re talking two or three hours of sleep a day) for the past few days, but I was struggling to come up with things to say about this one. My brain was and still is a-fog. In a way this is appropriate since “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” is a surreal narrative, but unfortunately it does not lead to clear-minded literary analysis. There is, of course, the chance that there isn’t much to say about this story because there simply—well—isn’t much to say about it. This is strange, because it’s not hackwork and Budrys’s good stuff lends itself to discussion, if only to criticize it; but then Budrys’s work tends to be more lucid than this story. It could be in attempting to write a nightmare masquerading as an SF narrative, taking after Philip K. Dick whether he intentionally did so or not, Budrys wrote something that can be experienced fine but not so easily rationalized. I’ve mentioned this before, but had Weird Tales still been around in the early ’60s Budrys could’ve reworked the story into a fantasy; it would not have taken much effort and might’ve actually improved the thing.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Inertia” by Nancy Kress

January 3rd, 2024

(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Analog, January 1990.)

Who Goes There?

Nancy Kress debuted in the ’70s, and became a big deal in the ’80s mostly on the back of some very good short fiction. Her 1991 novella “Beggars in Spain” (then expanded into a novel) is one of the most decorated of its kind in SF history. Her 1985 aliens-on-Earth vignette “Out of All Them Bright Stars” won a Nebula. She, along with Connie Willis, has been one of the most frequent and popular contributors to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and incidentally both women are very fond of writing at novella length. So today we’re looking at a Kress story that’s neither a novella nor published in Asimov’s. “Inertia” might be the best Kress story I’ve read so far; it’s certainly the complete package, containing thought-out speculation and human drama that struck a chord with me. That this story only got away with a Locus poll spot feels more than a little criminal.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which you cannot find anywhere at the moment. I’m sure it’ll be added to Luminist at some point, but thankfully I had bought a used copy of this issue some months ago. Gardner Dozois tended to overlook Analog stories, but he recognized this one’s quality enough to include in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection. “Inertia” was also reprinted in A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women (ed. Sheila Williams and Connie Willis) and Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (ed. John Joseph Adams). This last one, I’d argue, is a little misleading.

Enhancing Image

A note to put upfront is that “Inertia” discusses the lives of people with disabilities, with mental illness, and more subliminally works as a reaction to what was then the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. This is not light reading; indeed its dark hues stand out in a magazine that’s more known for rigorous but not emotionally intense fiction.

It’s the future (not too distant a future), and the US has mostly gone to shit. Riots have become a frequent occurrence and the country has basically devolved into a police state; but that’s only the case for “Outside.” There are sealed-off internment camps across the country containing those infected with a disease that at first glance sounds like Leprosy; it’s a skin disease in which the infected is scarred with ropy patches of skin, but without getting ahead of myself there’s more to it than that. The disease is communicable and so the infected are walled off in “blocks,” basically left to die since the government is no longer looking for a cure. It’s here that we’re introduced to the elderly narrator, her daughter Mamie, her teen granddaughter Rachel, and her in-law Jennie. “Jennie, the daughter of Mamie’s dead husband’s brother, is Rachel’s cousin, and technically Mamie is her guardian.” We start with two announcements in this little family unit: that Mamie is getting engaged to some guy named Peter, and that Jennie is bringing in someone from Outside—a doctor named Tom McHabe. The latter will turn out to have a profound effect on these characters.

“Inertia” both is and is not a dense read. The plot, if one were to recite to someone, is not complicated. It starts out as a slice-of-life narrative in what is admittedly a dreary setting before someone from Outside comes in and changes everything, and the story picks up inertia. There is, however, a lot of scarily plausible speculation, and these characters are never anything less than human. AIDS had been public knowledge for no quite five years when Kress wrote this story: the Reagan administration had deliberately ignored HIV/AIDS until it became literally impossible to do so, the result being that people were dying of a virus nobody knew anything about, and once it was made public there was a tidal wave of misinformation that would have long-term ramifications. Nowadays conservatives wanna downplay this, but the reality is that the Reagan administration had condemned a swath of the American population to death for the non-crime of homosexuality, and there were many politicians and pundits who came up with some truly monstrous ideas as to what ought to be done with AIDS victims. Putting thousands of people in internment camps is not even the worst thing that could’ve happened. In case you doubt me about the connection, we get a reference to AIDS in-story, although not by name, it being called “that other earlier one” that was sexually transmitted. Of course we know you could contract AIDS via blood transfusion, but in the ’80s it was typically known as something that happened between queer men.

Life in the camps is far from ideal, but it’s surprisingly functional. There are no riots. There’s no huge wealth disparity. There’s no war, naturally. People are able to provide for each other, even if they have to work every day for it. This is not an anarcho-communist paradise, mind you, because these people live in poverty and with an infection that might prove fatal, but as McHabe soon makes it clear, life Outside is often worse. You may recall that “Inertia” was reprinted in an anthology focused on stories about the apocalypse, and honestly I don’t think it qualifies. At the most you could say society in the story is on the brink of total collapse, but that the apocalypse has not happened—at least not yet. Journalists and pundits speculated that the camps would soon descend into total mayhem, but to their disappointment this has not happened. Obviously something is different about the people living in the camps, something that compels them to cooperate rather than start fighting in the streets (Kress does not seem to think people are inherently good), which is why McHabe is here. The government stopped finding a cure years ago, after several people in the camps were tested on and killed as a result (Mamie’s husband had died “of an experimental cure being tested by government doctors”), but that doesn’t stop people from coming in to conduct their own research illegally.

About the characters. I don’t think we ever get the narrator’s first name, but she’s as vividly drawn a protagonist as any you’ll find in the best short fiction, with bonus points for being an SF protagonist who’s both a woman and probably in her sixties. Rachel and Jennie, despite their age, are not the rebellious sort, and this pleasing demeanor will have plot importance. The big outlier among the women in the story is Mamie, who unlike her mother and daughter is far from content. For one, she finds out almost as soon as they’re engaged that Peter is cheating on her, although this doesn’t stop her from soon making up with him—probably more from her fear of being abandoned than anything Peter did to make it up to her. Given her outbursts and her fear of abandonment it’s quite possible Mamie has what we’d now call Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s unclear if she was always like this, whether it was being forced Inside, the death of her husband, or something that has always afflicted her; but then if a revelation later in the story is anything to go by it’s implied that Mamie always lived with mental illness, only that something exasperated her condition. Then there’s McHabe, who in a typical Analog story would be the protagonist, but here he’s a supporting character whose aims are noble but tragic.

Something odd I noticed is that Kress wrote this story in first-person present tense, which is uncommon and honestly hard to justify; you need a rather specific reason to write with this combination, otherwise it reads awkwardly and raises unnecessary questions. I suspect it’s because, given the context, it raises the emotional intensity of the narrative, but it also reinforces the notion that what Kress is talking about is happening in the now—that her future story is firmly rooted in what were then current events. The inhumane treatment of AIDS victims was a part of the background the story was written against, and this would be the case for many more years. It still holds true because homosexuality is still demonized in many pockets of the country, and those who suffer chronic illness are often denied proper accommodations. It’s funny because there is no homosexual activity in the story itself (the characters are drearily straight), but it’s something those who didn’t live under a rock would’ve picked up. Don’t get the wrong idea, though, “Inertia” has aged depressingly little; it actually holds up better than some of the award-winners from this period.

There Be Spoilers Here

The reason McHabe went Inside is to tudy the neurology of those with the infection, because it turns out this infects the brain as well as the skin. The people in the camps have not descended into anarchy because (assuming McHabe is correct) they’re constantly depressed—not clinically depressed, as he puts it, but mildly enough that they’re not quick to take action on anything. The infected are able to maintain a society with minimal resources because the infection messed with their brain chemicals such that by and large they’ve become docile. Curiously, this applies to neurotypical people, and the longer someone has had the infection the more chill they are; but again, this is assuming they would’ve been “balanced” before. Mamie probably had mental illness prior to getting infected, which seems to have thrown her more off-balance, and the consequences of this will prove to be disastrous for our characters. McHabe’s idea is to cure people of the skin disease part of the infection, but to leave the brain alteration as is, such that these people can hopefully rejoin “normal” society and “infect” as many people as possible. He thinks the infection, if rid of its harmful aspect, can be useful. The narrator is doubtful about this.

Mamie, in one of her manic episodes, betrays McHabe to the authorities, resulting in his execution. It speaks to the savagery of government authority at this point that McHabe is killed pretty much on the spot. It’s traumatic, but it’s also the push that compels Rachel and the narrator to escape to Outside, or die trying. There’s a passage at the end that really struck me, as someone who very likely has BPD myself, and it might speak truer than even Kress had intended—to those with mental illness, but also those who feel trapped by their conscience, by the tug-of-war between their thoughts and what they feel they ought to do. “[Rachel] is sixteen years old, and she believes—even growing up Inside, she believes this—that she must do something. Even if it is the wrong thing. To do the wrong thing, she has decided, is better than to do nothing.” It’s a spin on Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and in my opinion it’s at least as emotionally compelling, at least as thought-provoking, in no small part because unlike Le Guin’s story Kress’s has plot and characters. There’s a concreteness that pushes it out of the realm of pure allegory, and emerges arguably stronger for it. This is a deeply bittersweet ending.

A Step Farther Out

Theodore Sturgeon argued that a great SF story should ideally have both compelling human drama and a thoughtful speculative element. The reality is that a lot of good and even great SF stories only have one or the other, and Sturgeon’s own “A Saucer of Loneliness” is an iconic story despite its SFnal element being tangential. “Inertia” meets this ideal, though; it’s a deeply felt and rather angry story that was written in response to one of the American government’s biggest failures in living memory. While you can make an educated guess as to when this story was written, though, it remains relevant and gut-punching because the American government does not value the lives of its own people, especially people who live marginalized lifestyles and those who live with disabilities. This will continue to be true so long as the government only puts stock in people of a certain income, skin complexion, and balance of brain chemicals. Kress repeatedly shows herself to be a friend of the downtrodden, and “Inertia” is one of her most effective and overt studies of the people we leave behind.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: January 2024

January 1st, 2024
(Cover by Ron Walotsky. F&SF, February 1976.)

Happy New Year, ya screwheads. I said last month I would be taking a year off from covering serials, which means the field has very much opened up for tackling short fiction. The schedule I keep has changed in a sense, except not really; the only difference is that the spots that would normally be held for serial installments are now for short stories. So we’re looking at six or seven short stories a month, which if you ask me is for the best. There are so many short stories across the long history of the biz that I couldn’t stay content with only three or four a month. Think about how much ground there is to cover. Thus we have two novellas and seven short stories for this month, with as many authors being pulled.

There is one other thing I wanna mention, since it will be affecting what I cover for this year. As you know, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is celebrating its 75th anniversary; it had premiered way back in 1949, and was initially called The Magazine of Fantasy. F&SF is such a prestigious outlet, with such a long history and with so much good material gathered in its pages over the decades, that a year-long tribute is in order. The question I then had tumbling around in my head was: How do I go about this? The solution I came to was twofold: first, as with last year, I’ll be covering all short stories in March, July, and October, only this time it will be all fiction from F&SF‘s pages; and the second is that outside of those months I’ll be covering two pieces (a short story and novella, or two of either) from F&SF each month. For example, you may notice we have two novellas from F&SF for January, which I think is a fine idea.

How March, July, and October will work is that I’ll be covering the first thirty years of F&SF across these months, so one decade for each. I’ll be grabbing stories from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively, with the ’70s—falling on October—leaning more towards spooky stuff. F&SF‘s history is so rich that I won’t be able to give an adequate impression of its contents across 75 years, even with the methods I’ve created.

Lastly, in more solemn news, I’ll be reviewing works this month by some notable authors who sadly passed away recently. Michael F. Flynn died in September last year; Michael Bishop died in November; and David Drake died only last month. I’ve tackled Drake before, but while I wasn’t exactly a fan of “Time Safari” I did say I was curious to read more of his work. These are writers who are well-respected in the community and whom sadly I had read very little of when they were alive. If we’re to do right by the dead then we can’t afford to forget them.

For the novellas:
1. “Project Nursemaid” by Judith Merril. From the October 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She became known as an important critic and editor, but she started out as a member of the Futurians. Her story “That Only a Mother” is probably one of the most frequently reprinted classic SF stories, to the point that it’s now a little overexposed. I have to admit that aside from being force-fed “That Only a Mother” across multiple anthologies I’ve not read any of Merril’s other fiction, but I’m about to correct that!
2. “The Samurai and the Willows” by Michael Bishop. From the February 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Placed first in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novella. Speaking of writers I’ve been meaning to read more of, Bishop’s been on my radar for a minute now, but prior to his death I had only read a couple of his short stories. As with some other works of his, Bishop would revise “The Samurai and the Willows” extensively many years after the fact, but we’re reading it as it had originally appeared in F&SF.
For the short stories:
1. “Inertia” by Nancy Kress. From the January 1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction. I’ve covered Kress before, and while it’s always tempting to go for one of her novellas (given her fondness for that mode), I opted for something different—both in length and where the story was published. Kress has been a regular at Asimov’s for years, but “Inertia” is a rare appearance from her in Analog.
2. “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” by Algis Budrys. From the December 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. In some ways diametrically opposed to Judith Merril as a critic, and with as vicious an intellect, Budrys started as one of ’50s SF’s most promising writers. After a decade of heated activity he would turn away from fiction for the most part to focus on criticism and editing.
3. “Apartness” by Vernor Vinge. From the June 1965 issue of New Worlds. Vinge is one of the most important living SF writers, although sadly he retired from writing fiction about a decade ago. Despite being in some ways a prototypical Analog-type writer, Vinge made his debut in the Moorcock-run New Worlds with this story here. He would’ve been all of 19 years old when he wrote “Apartness.”
4. “House of Dreams” by Michael F. Flynn. From the October-November 1997 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner. I actually live one town over from Flynn, but sadly we never got to meet. “House of Dreams” is a rare case of Flynn appearing outside of Analog, and despite the Sturgeon win it has apparently never been reprinted in English, which is weird.
5. “The Valley Was Still” by Manly Wade Wellman. From the August 1939 issue of Weird Tales. Wellman started out during the Gernsback years, and was one of the few SFF authors of that era to maintain his street cred after Campbell took over Astounding—if only because he was more of a fantasy writer. I picked this one for the nerdy reason that it became the basis for a Twilight Zone episode.
6. “The Automatic Rifleman” by David Drake. From the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies. (Yes I’m still counting Destinies and its ilk as magazines.) David Drake was one of the codifying writers of military SF, but his range was a lot wider than that, having also written sword-and-sorcery fantasy and horror, on top of work that’s not so easy to classify. The following story seems to be an exercise in terror.
7. “The Agony of the Leaves” by Evelyn E. Smith. From the July 1954 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. I only discovered this one as part of a very recent SF anthology edited by a certain colleague, and I’m pretty sure it’s not SF. As with too many female SFF writers in the ’50s, Smith moved away from the short fiction market once new avenues opened up; after 1960 she mostly stuck to novels.
And that’s it.

Won’t you read with me?
Complete Novel Review: Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp

December 31st, 2023
(Cover by Edd Cartier. Unknown, December 1939.)

Who Goes There?

L. Sprague de Camp made his debut in 1937, and would remain more or less active until his death in 2000, although he would lean much more towards fantasy than SF after 1960. De Camp technically debuted before John W. Campbell’s takeover of Astounding, but he quickly became one of Campbell’s court jesters, his humor being just innuendo-laden enough but more often relying on deadpan and slapstick delivery. But it was with Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy sister magazine, that we saw much of de Camp’s best early work, both solo and in collaboration with Fletchet Pratt. It’s not surprising that in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp a solid portion of the stories included are from Unknown, despite that magazine only lasting a few years. De Camp would go on hiatus during America’s involvement in World War II, and he would not return to writing in earnest until around 1950. He’s probably most known today for his helping in raising awareness of Robert E. Howard’s work, if also his meddling in said work. The two would’ve been close contemporaries, had Howard lived.

Lest Darkness Fall was de Camp’s first solo novel (he had already written None But Lucifer with H. L. Gold), and it’s often considered his best. It was published in Unknown as a solid 50,000-word novel, which is why I’m confused by Wikipedia calling it the “short story version.” De Camp must’ve expanded it for book publication in 1941, but not by much, and he revised it for a 1949 reprint. This is often considered an SF novel, which makes its inclusion in Unknown a bit strange, but I do have a couple theories as to why it’s here: the first is the setting, which is pre-medieval and thus almost reads like low fantasy; the second is that Unknown had a policy of sometimes printing whole novels while Astounding did not, and Campbell maybe couldn’t fit Lest Darkness Fall in as a serial in the latter, for indeed it would’ve been too long to run in one piece.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1939 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. You can also read the 1949 revision here. Lest Darkness Fall ran as a five-part serial in Galaxy’s Edge, presumably based on the 1949 version. It’s also been bundled in a Gollancz SF Gateway Omnibus with Rogue Queen and The Tritonian Ring. It’s also been bundled with a couple sequels by other hands as Lest Darkness Fall and Related Stories. In other words, this is not exactly a hard novel to find, and because it’s short by modern standards it’s often been packaged with other things.

Enhancing Image

I have some notes:
1. De Camp does not waste time here, at least with getting us to 6th century Rome. Martin Padway is an archeologist and a bit of a workaholic who’s currently staying in 1930s Rome. (We get a mention of the country being run by Mussolini’s fascists, but Padway doesn’t seem to feel anything strongly about fascism, and anyway it’s not dwelt on.) Padway is also a divorcee; his wife left him because after “one taste of living in a tent and watching her husband mutter over the inscriptions on potsherds” she realized being an archeologist’s wife was not in the cards for her. This is about all we learn about Padway before a bolt of lightning sends him back to 535 CE. We’re not given even the ghost of an explanation for how a lightning strike could do this and it’s obvious that de Camp is not interested in the how of getting his hapless anti-hero to where he wants him to be.
2. The line of plausibility is a fine one to walk, and I would say de Camp succeeds so long as one does not go deliberately looking for holes. Of course some convenience is at play. It’s convenient that Padway is an archeologist and, by extension, a kind of historian, not to mention he seems to have read Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. De Camp himself admits in the introduction he took some inspiration from Robert Graves’s historical novels (incidentally I just finished I, Claudius), although Padway himself doesn’t mention Graves. This is a curious comparison, because the idea of making history entertaining was still a new concept then—not history as told in Hollywood productions but well-researched, fact-based history. With that said, while you do get some context within the novel, de Camp makes assumptions about the reader’s knowledge that probably aren’t valid anymore.
3. There is one thing that strains one’s suspension of disbelief, which is the language barrier. Italians in 535 CE spoke Latin, and Padway just so happens to know elementary-level Latin despite being a Congregationalist and not a Catholic; to de Camp’s credit he does acknowledge that language, even one as antiquated as Latin, changes over time, and so Padway talks with a heavy accent which other characters are quick to point out. Cleverly Padway adopts the more Latin-sounding name “Martinus Paduei” to fit in with the locals. Not sure why Padway wasn’t written as a Catholic (one who is estranged from his wife), since in the pre-Vatican II days it would’ve been perfectly sensible for a Catholic to know his Latin. Then again, Padway is mostly apolitical and unconcerned with religious matters, which is true of a lot of Protestants. De Camp is playfully ribbing some people here, but he’s not trying to make any kind of serious statement; this is, ultimately, an unserious novel.
4. So, the context: Rome in 535 CE is long past the days of Augustus, to put it lightly. The Italians have accepted Christianity for a couple centuries now, no longer looking to feed infidels to the lions, but the Roman Empire is now fractured. The western Italian-Gothic coalition is about to enter war with the Eastern Roman Empire, and the ensuing war will help bring about the Middle Ages, shrouding Europe “in darkness, from a scientific and technological aspect, for nearly a thousand years.” Padway knows that life in Rome is on the downslide and about to get much worse, but the people around him are blissfully ignorant of this. Surprisingly the idea of somehow returning to his own time doesn’t much occur to him; rather he quickly becomes concerned with surviving in a Rome that is about to get totally butt-fucked by war, and he also wonders if history can be changed enough to create an alternate future.
5. If you read anything about Lest Darkness Fall in advance then you know it’s alternate history novel, and indeed it doesn’t take long for Padway to introduce some changes that will have long-term consequences—some of which will not be to his advantage. Inventing the printing press and starting one’s own newspaper (freedom of the press and all that) in what amounts to a police state can land one in jail, as it turns out. Padway starts out “small,” teaching a local banker double-entry accounting, inventing the printing press, eventually starting the world’s firs telegraph line—you know how it is. Like I said, convenience plays a not-inconsiderable part here, although Padway is not a demigod; he can’t do everything himself. He gets arrested enough times that it becomes a sort of running gag. I would still argue Padway is too much of what Heinlein would call “the competent man,” and I have to wonder what would’ve happened if someone less skilled had been thrown back to Rome right before the Middle Ages; admittedly they would probably last all of three days.
6. As with Graves’s historical novels, de Camp throws some real-life figures into the mix, although due to the relative obscurity of the time period there’s nobody the reader is likely to recognize right away. I hope you know who Justinian is. And let’s not forget Thiudahad, king of the Italians and Goths who eventually succumbs to what is probably dementia or some other neurological disease; he’s pretty funny. The funniest might be Mathasuentha, princess and wife to whomever would succeed Thiudahad once he becomes unfit for the throne—and, much to Padway’s horror, a bloodthirsty opportunist. Padway considers romancing Mathasuentha until she reveals herself to be a bit of what we would call a yandere. “You wouldn’t exactly describe her as a ‘sweet’ girl,” the narrator tells us. Better to marry her off to Urias, who after all is a war hero and who can probably deal with her shenanigans. Padway himself remains a bachelor to the end, at least in the magazine version.
7. How good you think Lest Darkness Fall is will depend on how funny you think it is, because it is very much a novel filled with what we humans would call “jokes.” De Camp isn’t always funny, and I think his cynical brand of conservatism (almost like a distant precursor to South Park-type humor) holds him back from being a more serious writer, but when he’s on the ball he can elicit some chuckles. The novel becomes less funny as it pivots more towards alternate history warfare (this is when Padway gains enough clout to basically do Thiudahad’s job for him), but we’re assured that despite what the title suggests, nothing too dark will happen. This is largely because even as Padway’s situation becomes more serious, both Padway and the third-person narrator remain as deadpan as ever. At one point Padway ponders the evils of slavery and how he should probably do something about it, but it reads like someone writing down stuff they ought to buy as the grocery store. Like I said, not a very serious novel.
8. I can see why de Camp would add a few thousand words onto the novel for book publication, but if anything he should’ve expanded it even further. Lest Darkness Fall, for how much ground it’s covering, is too short; the magazine version is about 50,000 words long and it could easily be twice that length. I know this is weird coming from me, as someone who tends to like short novels, but consider that I, Claudius is 450 pages long and still omly makes up the first half of a larger narrative. There are characters who brim with personality but barely get any screentime because this novel is a train and the train will not stop. SFF novels prior to the ‘60s often didn’t go past 300 pages, and this is sometimes a bad thing because some narratives need more space to reach their full potential. Lest Darkness Fall feels like the abridged version of a complete novel which sadly does not exist.
There Be Spoilers Here

Darkness does not fall.

A Step Farther Out

The “modern man sent to the distant past” plot type has been done many times since Lest Darkness Fall, and needless to say some authors have built on the foundation de Camp laid down. There’s a lot of room for navel-gazing with this premise and de Camp keeps that to a minimum, for better or worse. If this novel succeeds (and it is a succeess for what it is), it’s because de Camp’s fascination with the foibles of ancient history is infectious, helped by the fact that this is a perfectly balanced, well-oiled machine of a novel. We’re given just enough context in what was then the modern day before being hit with the time-travel lightning. Padway is a bit of a scoundrel, but he’s not unlikable enough to make us always following him a chore; to make him a total asshole would’ve been fatal for the novel. There’s some commentary on the gap in values between Italy circa 535 CE and 20th century America, but not enough to give one the impression that de Camp is trying to make one of those pesky political statements. If this sounds like a cynical assessment of the novel, that’s because it’s a cynical novel.

What made Lest Darkness Fall inspirational for a couple generations of SFF writers is that it’s history made entertaining; one might even call it an early example of “edutainment” in genre literature. Admittely you may wanna do some extra reading on the twilight years of the Roman Empire, since de Camp assumes you’re a well-educated person who already know enough going in; this might’ve been true in 1939, but needless to say our priorities with history have changed drastically since then. It’s a genuinely funny novel, if also slight in terms of emotional and thematic content. Had I read this, say, five to ten years earlier, I probably would’ve loved it; but I also think it has since been outshined by its own progeny.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Beyond the Black River by Robert E. Howard (Part 2/2)

December 27th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, June 1935.)

The Story So Far

There’s a frontier war going on the between the Aquilonians and the Picts, the former trying to expand westward and the latter trying to keep their territory by any means necessary. The Aquilonians have better weapons and fortification, but the Picts in the area have a secret weapon in the sorcerer Zogar Sag, who incidentally is out for revenge against Fort Tuscelan. We follow Balthus, a young Aquilonian warrior set to be at Fort Tuscelan, and Conan, a Cimmerian who is currently working as a mercenary for the Aquilonian government. The first believes that expansion is both possible and good for humanity; the latter does not. As far as Conan’s concerned he’s doing it for the paycheck, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting Zogar Sag’s head on a platter—for the sorcerer’s treacherousness if not to defend the fort. Indeed this Pictish sorcerer has been collecting human heads for the purposes of blood sacrifices.

Regrouping at the fort, Conan assembles a crack team of warriors to cross Black River and take out Zogar Sag on the down-low, so as to hopefully prevent an all-out skermish between the Picts and the fort. It goes about as well as you’d expect: all the men get killed off, either right away or in the sorcerer’s hideout, and Balthus only lives because Conan rescues him. They discover, perhaps too late, that the sorcerer is not fucking around, as he’s able to conjure (among other things) a giant snake and a shadowy beast that stalks the woods. Killing Zogar Sag becomes secondary to making it out of Pict territory alive, but also warning the fort.

Enhancing Image

What began now as an assassination attempt has now turned into a losing battle. Conan expressed doubts that the Aquilonians could hold the frontier earlier, and these doubts are proved valid when Zogar Sag’s forces cross Black River in search of the fort, where they will be sure to give no quarter. It’s here that Conan and Balthus split up, and it’s also here that we’re introduced to our last major character: Slasher, a mangy dog who was orphaned when his settler owners got killed. Depending on your politics Howard might be doing too much to humanize the settlers, despite also thinking that their cause is a fatally misguided one, not helped by the Picts being written as mindless brutes. Still, this is more nuance than one would expect from a pulpy sword-and-sorcery tale with lots of delicious gore that was written in the ’30s. One has to wonder what Howard would’ve done had he lived to contribute to the more “socially aware” Unknown a few years hence.

Howard is not known for his delicateness with language (despite writing a fair amount of poetry), and true enough his writing is often at its best with either dialogue or visceral action. He does, however, sometimes plop a bomb in the reader’s lap in the form of a really juicy passage. He crystalizes what makes Conan special, both in the context of his world (as a future barbarian king), and as a seminal figure in heroic fantasy. There was, to my knowledge, not a single character in the annals of heroic fantasy prior to Conan who stood so boldly against everything “polite society” in Howard’s day stood for, nor illustrated so clearly. Observe:

He felt lonely, in spite of his companion. Conan was as much a part of this wilderness as Balthus was alien to it. The Cimmerian might have spent years among the great cities of the world; he might have walked with the rulers of civilization; he might even achieve his wild whim some day and rule as king of a civilized nation; stranger things had happened. But he was no less a barbarian. He was concerned only with the naked fundamentals of life. The warm intimacies of small, kindly things, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized men’s lives were meaningless to him. A wolf was no less a wolf because a whim of chance caused him to run with the watchdogs. Bloodshed and violence and savagery were the natural elements of the life Conan knew; he could not, and would never, understand the little things that are so dear to civilized men and women.

One gripe I have with this story is that Zogar Sag is not a character; he doesn’t really have a personality, nor do anything that immediately distinguishes him from other Conan villains. He’s almost unnecessary for the story to even work, but admittedly how Conan disposes of him does offer the one little ray of light in what is otherwise a gloomy ending. Sure, Conan kills the demon Zogar Sag is linked with (the latter dying at the fort from seemingly nothing), and the sorcerer’s death demoralizes the Picts enough to make them retreat, but it’s a pyrrhic victory. All the men who stood to defend the fort have been killed with a single exception. The loss of the fort is so big that the border will be pushed back. Balthus and Slasher die in battle, fighting off Picts just so the women and children have enough time to evacuate, otherwise there would’ve been no survivors. Conan is literally one of only two survivors by story’s end.

A certain colleague of mine said that when she had first read this story many moons ago that Slasher’s death made her cry. It didn’t get that reaction out of me on either reading, but a) it speaks to Howard’s skills as a storyteller that we can feel for an animal that only shows up in the last quarter of the story, and b) on this second read I did feel sort of overwhelmed by the sheer gloominess of this story’s climax. Not that the Conan series is known for being uplifting (Conan himself is a pessimist and characters, be they heroic or villainous, are likely to meet bad ends), but even by those standards Beyond the Black River stands out as probably the gloomiest in the whole series. We’re told at the end that civilization “is a whim of circumstance,” and curiously this final line is not spoken by Conan but by an unnamed woodsman, who nonetheless shares Conan’s worldview. Appeal-to-nature fallacy aside, Howard seems to be saying that civilization, no matter how great, is only temporary; once it inevitably gives way, barbarism will take its seat on the throne, just as it had done previously.

A Step Farther Out

Beyond the Black River is arguably the best Conan story done by Howard’s pen, but I wouldn’t recommend it as one’s first Conan story. Aside from the genre mixing, this is an especially dark tale that lacks some of what had become hallmarks in the series, like Conan saving a scantily clad damsel in distress, and indeed there’s no romance plot nor any named female characters to speak of. This is not necessarily a bad thing. This was not the last Conan story written or even published in Howard’s lifetime, but it feels like a culimination of what Howard was trying to say with the character. This is the most vivid thesis statement on what Conan represents and what Howard was trying to do with the series. As such I would recommend reading it only after getting at least a few prior Conan stories under your belt; it becomes more rewarding the more you put into it.

And that’s it—my last serial review until 2025. 2024 will be focused on short stories, novellas, and the occasional novel. Reviewing serials takes a certain amount of energy out of me, and as I’m looking for a new job (yes, I’m back on the job hunt), I don’t wanna become fatigued on this blog. I love writing about mostly old-timey SFF and it would be a shame if personal issues got in the way of this specific hobby of mine. This is not my last review for 2023 (there’s one more in the oven), but still it marks the beginning of a hiatus I’m taking from reviewing a mode of fiction.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Genesis” by H. Beam Piper

December 24th, 2023

(Cover by Milton Luros. Future, September 1951.)

Who Goes There?

H. Beam Piper is one of the most intriguing and certainly one of the most tragic figures in old-timey SF. He made his debut with “Time and Time Again,” a pretty solid first story, in 1947, and kept writing off and on for the next decade. In the last five years of his life Piper went through a kind of metamorphosis, such that while he did write a couple novels before 1960, the years 1961 to 1965 saw at least one novel per year, with Little Fuzzy nabbing him a Hugo nomination. Unfortunately Piper did not have much time to enjoy this artistic success, as he committed suicide in 1964, and because he got his start very late in life his career was short-lived despite not exactly dying young. The SF Encyclopedia is mostly written in a matter-of-fact way, as befits an encyclopedia, but John Clute’s final words on Piper’s entry are bone-chilling: “He died in his prime.”

Piper’s work has this tendency to stand out in ways other SF of the period did not, even when he was playing with premises that were by no means novel. I’ve read quite a bit of ’50s SF at this point and Piper is the only writer I’ve met from that period who consistently posited that not only would a hypothetical space-faring humanity be multiracial, but that mixed-race people would be rather common in such a future; as a ressult of this his characters are often at least implied to be non-white. Women also do pretty well in Piper’s stories, despite his habit of calling them “girls,” as they’re shown to be as intelligent and capable as their male counterparts. “Genesis” is a take on something that even in 1951 must’ve been familiar to readers: the Adam-and-Eve plot. It’s the little things peppered throughout this story, though, that make it worth reading.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1951 issue of Future Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. The only time “Genesis” was reprinted in Piper’s lifetime was in the anthology Shadow of Tomorrow (ed. Frederik Pohl). It was later collected in The Worlds of H. Beam Piper, which was part of a concerted effort from Ace in the early ’80s to put Piper’s work back into print. I recommend not looking up all the places this has been reprinted, since a couple of them have titles that give away plot twists. The good news, if you’re looking to read this for free and without guilt, is that most of Piper’s work has fallen into public domain, including this story. You can read it on Project Gutenberg, naturally.

Enhancing Image

A generation ship has headed out from the dying planet Doorsha, for a habitable planet called Tareesh for some 1,500 people may live. It’s the only ship of its kind, “fifty years’ effort” and without the resources neeed to make a second such ship. It would be a terrible shame, then, if a security failure were to result in the ship’s destruction. As if on cue, a meteor hits the ship and things fall apart fast enough that (as far as we know) only one escape pod makesss it out, with a one-way ticket to Tareesh. The pod contains two men and six women; Kalvar Dard and Seldar Glav, the men, are trained professionals, and unusually for a ’50s SF story so are the women for the most part. Olva is an “electromagnetician,” Varnis is a “machinist’s helper,” Kyna is a “surgeon’s-aide,” Dorita is an accountant, and Eldra is an “armament technician.” We’re not told what Analea’s—the last woman’s—job is, but I’m just listing these off to give you the idea that despite these grown women being called girls, they are still quite capable.

The first stretch of “Genesis,” which thankfully is not long, is also easily the weakest part. With pretty much any SF story there’s the question of plausibility, and I don’t think the way by which Piper puts his characters on Tareesh is all that plausible. For one I struggle to believe there would be only one generation ship without any backup, given a) the race’s survival depends on it not getting blown to bits, and b) the likelihood of an accident such as the one aforementioned occurring in space. I also would’ve thought there would be more survivors from the accident, maybe a few more lifeboats that made it to Tareesh; but I don’t think I’m spoiling things by saying that, at least far as our characters know, they’re the only survivors. Also, with what we have learned about space travel since 1951, it goes without saying that not only would a perfectly habitable planet like Tareesh be exceedingly unlikely, especially since it’s said to not be too far away from Doorsha, but that Our Heroes™ would at the very least be hindered by the change in gravity and air content; but then this is the sort of thing you have to accept with all but the hardest SF from that era.

I’m getting this negative criticism out of the way first, for one because this story’s problems are frontloaded, but also because otherwise I found the story to be a pretty good time once we land on Tareesh. The idea is simple enough: we have eight people, presumably the last of their rest (the rest stranded on a dying planet), who must not only survive in this harsh new environment but work to rebuild civilization. They have a few guns with ammo and some explosives, but these are very finite resources and at some point they will have to forge their own primitive weapons. The good news is that Tareesh is teeming with life that can be hunted for food and clothing; the bad news is that Our Heroes™ have some competition. A race of humanoids who may or may not be native to this planet, called the Hairy People, are aggressive and tribal, yet are intelligent enough to use tools and have their own language, “too bestial to bury as befitted human dead, but too manlike to skin and eat as game.” What ensues is a series of skirmishes over the years between Our Heroes™ and the Hairy People, and what makes this conflict unusual is that while Piper frames the latter as villainous, he also gives them enough humanity that their existence falls into the uncanny valley, never mind that the violence is tragic.

Life on Tareesh soon proves to be cutthroat, and while normally in old-timey SF women are spared from such ruthlessness, Kyna dies in childbirth while Eldra gets killed rather brutally by the Hairy People. Five years in and the original party has whittled down from eight to five; but all is not lost, as a few children have entered the fray. Something clever Piper does is he doesn’t always tell us who fathered what child, and ultimately raising the children is a group effort; it’s also not always clear who is paired with whom, romantically or sexually. It is clear from the very outset that the survivors all like each other, and that jealousy doesn’t seem to be an issue. This is like the polar opposite of Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To…, which you may recall is a nasty subversion of the science-fictional Adam-and-Eve plot; in that novel nobody likes each other, and the unnamed heroine would rather spend the rest of her days playing card games than be forced to act as an Eve on a desolate planet. I would argue Piper’s version is just as much a subversion, coming from the other direction, in that it posits that the nuclear family model is unnecessary for human survival, and indeed might not be preferable for the persons involved. The word would not be coined for several more decades, but what we have here is arguably a polycule. Piper ditches romance drama in favor of cooperation.

Piper was not a poet, nor was he the hardest of science-fictionists (he had a few funny ideas, which we’ll get to), but he did have a knack for adventure writing. His prose is often lean and muscular; every gunshot and knife blow has weight to it, both from the punchiness of the style and the human cost involved. We don’t get to know Eldra much as a person, but we know just enough, and are given enough detail as to how she died, that her death still strikes a chord. These characters are broadly drawn in that we don’t get to know much about them as individuals, but we do understand what they mean to each other and what their survival means for their species; as such each death means something. Tareesh is vividly depicted as habitable but not hospitable; anyone can die here, man, woman, or child. A common criticism with old SF stories (and some recent ones actually) is that alien planets tend to just be Earth 2.0, but there is a reason for why Tareesh’s landscape and lifeforms will strike the reader as familiar; but for now I’ll hold off on giving that twist away. Said twist also seems to have caused some confusion as to whether “Genesis” is a one-off story or part of one of Piper’s series, but I’ll give my own theory on that in a minute.

There Be Spoilers Here

Twenty years after the crash landing and now only three of the original eight remain: Analea broke her back in an accident and opted to kill herself; Glav broke through the ice on a frozen river and survived, only to die later of hypothermia; and Olva got killed by the Hairy People. Varnis has gone insane from years of trauma, but the group still takes care of her. In a society where every human life matters, even those with mental illness are looked after. By the end of the story only two of the original eight are left, and one of them is delusional. Dard sacrifices himself with one of the last explosives on hand, to protect his tribe from the Hairy People. He won’t live to witness it, but Dard’s people will wage war against the Hairy People and drive them into extinction, for the Hairy People are Neanderthals—our close relatives in the last ice age. Doorsha is Mars, and Tareesh is Earth. You probably anticipated this twist, but as a dumb sack of shit I did not call it right away.

There’s a good deal to unpack here. Piper does not shy away from the fact that genocide would’ve played a part in Neanderthals going extinct, although we now know another reason was crossbreeding between the races (a good fraction of people alive today have a sliver of Neanderthal DNA in them), effectively homo sapiens absorbing the less adaptable Neanderthals. Homo sapiens being Martians also sort of falls in line with the first modern humans being non-white; this is another case of Piper sneaking non-white characters into his narratives. There’s some discomfort in the non-judgmental way in which said genocide is depicted, but I don’t think Piper is condoning it either; rather he’s chronicling something that (as far as we knew at the time) really happened, and if anything there’s a melancholy tone that intensifies as the story reaches its conclusion. The ensuing warfare between the humanoids is framed less as heroism and more as a consequence of the Martians’ need for survival. “You do what you must” seems to be the sentiment.

Since we’ve reached the story’s end I think it’s fair to bring up something that struck me as peculiar when I was looking into it pre-read. On ISFDB “Genesis” is labeled as a Paratime story, which confused me because a) it does not involve time travel, and b) Piper himself did not count it as part of that series. The people at ISFDB do invaluable work, but they also sometimes fuck up. The mix-up has at least two causes, as far as I can tell: the first is that it was reprinted in the series collection Paratime! from Wildside Press—although, tellingly, not in Ace’s The Complete Paratime. The other thing is that the lore of “Genesis” and the Paratime stories do not seem to contradict each other. In the Paratime series it’s all but said that homo sapiens descended from Martians, and indeed “Genesis” could serve as the germ for our Earth’s timeline in the Paratime continuity. But the two are not explicitly connected, and rather from what I can tell Piper might’ve genuinely believed that not only was there life on Mars but that these Martians are our ancestors. It’s unscientific, but you have to admit it’s fun to think about.

A Step Farther Out

Piper was not the most refined writer, and I have to admit “Genesis” could’ve been bumped up from a pretty good story to a very good one with one more rewrite, especially focused on the beginning. It’s quite possible, of course, that Piper wrote this story in a single blistering session, checked it once over for obvious mistakes, before sending it to his agent; this would’ve been far from unusual for SF writers at the time. It also might’ve been published in the low-budget Future because it got rejected (actually it almost certainly was a reject from the higher-paying magazines) elsewhere, but while it’s easy to think the cracks in the story’s armor did not endear it to more discerning editors, it might’ve also gotten rejected for being subtly subversive. Piper’s work is never perfect, but it’s often interesting in ways other SF of the time was usually not, and “Genesis” is no exception.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Beyond the Black River by Robert E. Howard (Part 1/2)

December 20th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, May 1935.)

Who Goes There?

It’s telling of Robert E. Howard’s skill as well as his productivity that despite committing suicide at the age of thirty (most authors barely get their careers started by thirty these days), he stands out as one of the most influential American fantasists. He got his start when he was a teenager and from then on he never stopped writing, with a truly staggering amount of short fiction and poetry under his belt. (He only wrote two novels, however, one of which doesn’t seem to have been finished at the time of his death.) Howard started several series over his career, the most famous of these being Conan the Cimmerian, or Conan the Barbarian as he’s more popularly known. This one character (who admittedly is rarely ever depicted accurately in media by other hands) would lay the groundwork for sword-and-sorcery fantasy as we tend to recognize it, despite Conan not being Howard’s first attempt at such a character but rather a culmination. God only knows what the field would look like had Howard not died so young.

This will be my last serial review until 2025, and we’re capping things off with a reread. “Beyond the Black River” was one of the first Conan stories I had ever read, and it definitely helped ignite my interest in classic heroic fantasy, not to mention Howard’s writing. Conan himself is a bit of a handyman, taking on different odd jobs between stories, and this is reflected in the stories themselves taking on different subgenres, from straight action fantasy to weird horror. In the case of “Beyond the Black River” we see weird horror being wedded to—of all things—the frontier Western (think less A Fistful of Dollars and more The Last of the Mohicans). Howard really loved Westerns and he actually wrote a fair amount of straight examples of that genre, without fantastical elements.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in the May and June 1935 issues of Weird Tales, which are on the Archive. It’s in more Conan collections than I can count, honestly, but good news is you don’t have to worry about tracking down a hard copy unlesss you really want to, because it’s on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

We start, not with Conan but a young Aquilonian settler named Balthus, who is on his way to his fort near Black River. He witnesses a fight between a Pict (a barbarian native to the land on which Balthus’s fort borders) and Conan, who really needs no introduction. Well, maybe a little. Conan is one of the most frequently (and inaccurately) depicted fantasy characters in visual media, and this is no doubt helped by Howard giving us some very juicy descriptions of his physique and demeanor in every story. He’s tanned, has raven-black hair, is built like a brick shithouse, moves “with the dangerous ease of a panther,” and is “too fiercely supple to be a product of civilization.” Conan is a Cimmerian, from a long line of Celtic barbarians, and in this sense he’s not dissimilar from the Pict whom he makes short work of. Balthus and Conan are working for the same side, although unlike the former, who believes in westward expansion, Conan is merely doing it for money, acting as muscle for the Aquilonians.

There’s a frontier war going on between the Picts and the Aquilonians, or more accurately a series of skirmishes. The only thing separating Pict land and Fort Tuscelan is Black River (not the black river as the title would suggest), not to mention woodland. The Aquilonians are a “civilized” people who, in the name of settler colonalism, may have bitten off more than they could chew. Balthus and Conan quickly find that there are far more dangerous things in the forest than Picts, for some animal had nearly ripped off the head of some dead merchant named Tiberias. We’re told of a Pictish sorcerer, Zogar Sag, who had been imprisoned in Fort Tuscelan for theft, but escaped and has since sought his revenge. The men who had originally detained the sorcerer were all killed, with their heads torn off. Zogar Sag lurks in Gwawela, a Pictish village on the other side of Black River. Clearly one side or the other must yield, but so far it’s been a stalemate between the Picts and Aquilonians, which is where Conan comes into play.

Beyond the Black River is a very different kind of story from the last Conan outing I reviewed, The People of the Black Circle, and indeed is quite different from other Conan stories I’ve read. Typically, though the narration is third-person, the perspective tends to be from Conan’s, at least when he’s onscreen. It’s pretty clear from the outset here, though, that Balthus is basically the protagonist of this story, not Conan. Of course, Conan is guaranteed to survive any story he’s in, but the same can’t be said of literally anyone else—including the person the story is really about. Another weird thing is that, to my knowledge, this is the only time Howard injects Western elements into the Conan series, although it’s certainly not the only time he mixed weird fiction with the Western. More specifically Beyond the Black River harks to a subgenre of Western that’s even older than the John Wayne variety—in this case James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. Even the title would not be out of place in a Western pulp magazine.

Morality in the Conan series tends to lean towards a dark shade of grey, and Conan himself often only does heroic things by virtue of helping people who are not as bad as the opposition. In this case Our Anti-Hero™ gets caught between the settlers, who are rather misguided to put it one way, and Zogar Sag, who is actively malicious. There’s some debate, from a modern left-leaning perspective, if the settlers are sympathetic at all, given that they also indulge in racism against the Picts, and it’s not entirely clear how Howard himself sees them. Something very curious Howard does is he makes both sides of the conflict white, although the Picts (like Conan) are described as “swarthy” and dark-skinned, “but the border men never spoke of them as such.” It’s easy to make parallels, such as between WASPs and white Jews and in the US, or—more likely what Howard intended—between WASPs and the Irish. It’s unclear at what point the Irish started to not count as “off-white” in the US, but clearly anti-Irish discrimination was something experienced within living memory in Howard’s time.

(Conan himself continues to be one of the most entertaining characters in fantasy, in no small part because he’s a bit of a scoundrel. While he is a great warrior and there’s definitely a noble quality about him, he has no qualms with playing sides against each other, or even working for a faction he used to be enemies with if the pay is right. He admits pretty casually to Balthus that he had fought against the Aquilonians some years prior, despite now being on that government’s payroll as a mercenery.)

Beyond the Black River might be the most overt example of Howard’s thesis on the relationship between man and civilization, and it’s a shame he died when he did because had he lived he probably would’ve been able to refine it. Howard was pretty open-minded for a man of his time and place, but he still had his own prejudices, and there’s definitely something questionable going on in the dynamic between the settlers and Picts. I mentioned Cooper’s frontier Westerns before, and now I’m gonna specify the comparison a bit more, perhaps to an uncomfortable degree. Making the Picts white was a clever move, because it softens the blow—that being that this is clearly running parallel to American westward expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s true that the settlers are not shown in the fondest light (indeed Conan thinks their enterprise foolish), but the Picts—the stand-ins for Native Americans nations—are mindless fiends who probably don’t deserve to keep their land. That Zogar Sag is a ruthless killer who collects human heads and does blood sacrifices arguably plays into certain real-world stereotypes, and not incidentally the settlers call the Picts “savages.”

There Be Spoilers Here

Conan thinks correctly that it’d be better to assassinate Zogar Sag with a small group of warriors than a whole battalion, but it still goes about as well as you’d expect. Also, is it just me or did Howard really have a thing against snakes? Giant snakes show up pretty regularly in his fiction and the halfway point of Beyond the Black River is no exception.

A Step Farther Out

This is not what I would recommend as one’s first Conan story, but for my money it might be the most intriguing of the ones I’ve read; it’s certainly the one that tries hardest to worm its way out of what must’ve already become predictable sword-and-sorcery cliches. In some ways it feels complementary to another Conan story Howard wrote around the same time, “Queen of the Black Coast,” in which Conan takes up piracy and even falls for a pirate queen who’s no less a fearless adventurer than him. There aren’t any notable female characters in Beyond the Black River to my recollection, and actually this is a rare case of Conan not saving a scantily clad damsel—although Balthus fulfills the “damsel” part at the end of this installment. This is more downbeat and not as overtly pulpy as other Conan stories, and its lateness plus its mixing of genres imply that maybe Howard considered branching out with his writing; he was maturing, but unfortunately he would not give himself much more time to do that.

See you next time.