Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Short Story Review: “Initiative” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

February 20th, 2024

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

Who Goes There?

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

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

Placing Coordinates

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

Enhancing Image

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

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

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

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

There Be Spoilers Here

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

A Step Farther Out

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

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

February 17th, 2024

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

Who Goes There?

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

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

Placing Coordinates

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

Enhancing Image

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

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

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

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

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

There Be Spoilers Here

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

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

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

A Step Farther Out

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

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

February 15th, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I named my temple knight Bubbus.

(From Demon’s Souls, 2009.)

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

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

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

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

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

February 13th, 2024

(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, October 1945.)

Who Goes There?

Kuttner and Moore were a husband-wife duo who started out separately, writing mostly for Weird Tales in the ’30s before marrying in 1940. They had collaborated a couple times pre-marriage, but the early ’40s saw an explosion of work from the two, often under pseudonyms. They were a two-person writing factory in the ’40s, and while they rarely went back to the horror and weird fantasy of their early years, to compensate they produced some of the best SF of the so-called Golden Age. Sadly after 1950 their output went down massively, apparently because both went back to school, and tragically Kuttner died in 1958 before he could get his Master’s and, presumably, go back to writing full-time. Moore stopped writing genre fiction after Kuttner died, and a few years later she would stop writing altogether; the flame that kept her inspiration going seemed to have gone out. Moore would outlive her first husband by almost thirty years.

“What You Need” was published under the Lewis Padgett pseudonym, which is typically more associated with Kuttner, although it does strike a certain tonal balance that implies significant contributions from both parties. With some exceptions (like the Gallagher stories, which are solo Kuttner), we don’t really know who wrote what. Sometimes you have to use your intuition with these things. I’m pretty sure the folks at ISFDB assign author credits for Kuttner/Moore collabs (especially if they were originally published under Kuttner’s name alone) at random. “What You Need” is a pretty good story from when the two were at the absolute height of their powers, together if not individually. It also got adapted into a classic Twilight Zone episode, which I’m sure Kuttner would’ve appreciated.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was later anthologized in Omnibus of Science Fiction (ed. Groff Conklin), The Great SF Stories Volume 7 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Matheson, and Charles G. Waugh). It’s also in The Best of Henry Kuttner and, of course, Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.

Enhancing Image

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure at first if this was SF or fantasy that John W. Campbell had somehow snuck into Astounding (he’d done it before), given the magic shop premise, but rest assured this is SF. Admittedlyit’s a soft-enough science that no wonder Rod Serling thought it fit for adaptation. The time scanner at the heart of the story may as well be magic, but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. We have two main characters: Tim Carmichael, a journalist who’s recently sniffed out an unusual shop with very selective clientele, and Peter Talley, the owner of said shop. The characters are very Kuttner-y in the sense that they indulge in street talk and have a certain ruthlessness about them. Carmichael is, at best, an anti-hero who, in trying to find out what Talley’s shop could be selling, gets more than he could’ve possibly bargained for. Thing is, Talley’s shop doesn’t sell products but a service. “We Have What You Need” is its slogan, and while Talley does give things to his clients, it’s not the product that’s worth the fee but what it might mean to the customer. A rich man might pay a lot for what looks like a normal chicken egg if the egg will prove to have a certain utility. “Had Earth’s last hen died ten years before, he could have been no more pleased.” Interestingly we never do find out what use such a thing could have.

Talley’s secret is a time scanner—a sort of probability machine that can see into the future. We’re not told much about how the machine works, and anyway the details don’t matter; this is what I mean by “What You Mean” only being nominally SF. Naturally Carmichael is curious about how such a machine might work, and Talley, despite the reporter being a sketchy figure, is inclined to prove the scanner’s legitimacy. Carmichael receives “a pair of shears, the blades protected by a sheath of folded, glued cardboard,” which according to Talley will prove very useful at some point in the near future, although Talley does not say just how a pair of shears might be useful. Cut to a later scene where, in the midst of a drunken escapade with a colleague, Carmichael nearly gets killed by the printer at his own workplace; but he remembers having the shears and manages to cut himself free from the killer printer. Not all items Talley gives to his clients, he says, will be a matter of life and death like this. Nevertheless, Carmichael is convinced. Talley normally deals with rich folks, but he’s willing to make an exception (it’s not totally clear why) with the decidedly middle-class reporter. If you’re familiar with Kuttner’s work (I’m singling out Kuttner because I’m convinced he was the primary force on this one) then you can guess that such a business relationship won’t end well.

Now, I could poke a few holes in all this, because while the time scanner is not a time machine exactly it is very much a time viewer, which is adjacent enough that the rules of time travel still mostly apply. Talley can see into specific people’s futures, including his own, and just because said future is only “likely” to happen instead of guaranteed (remember that this is based on probability) doesn’t mean it’s not magic. Still, it’s pretty interesting that we have effectively two protagonists, and that neither one is evil; at most they both have a good dose of moral greyness. This is a bit of a strange Kuttner/Moore story, because it feels more fantastical than SFnal, despite being printed in Astounding, and there’s an urbane wise-guy attitude to it that makes it seem more indicative of where genre SF was heading in the coming decade (namely with material that would get published in Galaxy) than peak-era Campbellian SF. Kuttner and Moore were ahead of their time, such that it’s a shame their output slows down to a trickle by the time the ’50s rolled around; what little work we do have from them from that period indicates a restless creativity that was nowhere near done.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s at this point that we run into a bit of a structural problem: “What You Need” has basically two endings, both of which are valid. We get a section entirely in italics where Talley sees that, ten years down the line, Carmichael will kill him and take the scanner for himself. Knowing that it’s too late to deter Carmichael from getting more involved with the shop, but also being too humane (or maybe too much of a coward) to do something about it directly, Talley opts for a trick: get Carmichael “a pair of plastic-soled shoes” and act like these will be helpful to him one week hence. Little does Carmichael know, and neither can he suspect, that the smooth-soled shoes were deliberately picked so that in one week he would slip on them while at the subway and get run over in a horrific train accident. This ending could definitely work: it has an eerie quality to it since we don’t see Carmichael’s death but can infer his fate is sealed, not to mention there’s a moral ambivalence at play. We’re made to think at first that Talley is doing this merely out of self-preservation, which is not exactly a noble goal but at least it’s understandable and keeps him sympathetic.

(A useful thing to remember with stories at least partly written by Kuttner is that schmucks in Kuttner stories never prosper. Carmichael is not an irredeemable person, so his death is not simply framed as karmic justice, but someone with flexible morals like him are likely to meet a very bad end. In some stories the schmuck getting his comeuppance is done for comedy, but here it’s treated as a necessary evil.)

But there’s a second ending! There’s a rather detached scene (because it happens at some indeterminate point after Talley has more or less sent Carmichael to his death) in which Talley elaborates on his reasoning for having doomed Carmichael—for why he’s so determined to protect the scanner. This is all internal, since Talley is by himself and it’s not like he’s telling himself ssomething he didn’t know before. I’m not sure whose idea it was to end the story on this note, but I think it’s maybe unnecessary—except for one thing. The final scene puts “What You Need,” pretty subtly (for a Golden Age SF story), in the realm of atomic allegory. The scanner’s potential could prove catastrophic, such that Talley doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands; and Talley, being a morally gentle fellow, considers himself the best-case scenario for someone owning the scanner. This does raise the question of, if the scanner is such a terrible machine then why doesn’t Talley simply destroy it (there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping him), but if this is something comparable to atomic weaponry then maybe the point is that such a machine is inevitable. Once the cat’s out of the bag you can’t put it back in. I like the metaphor, but I don’t like how this fairly short story has to end twice for such a point to be made.

A Step Farther Out

I’m not sure how long it took Kuttner and Moore to write stuff together; they were working at such a breakneck pace in the ’40s that their material was probably put on magazines’ backlogs in no time. It’s totally possible they had come up with the premise for “What You Need” a couple years earlier and had envisioned it as a fantasy, to be more fit for Unknown than Astounding; but then Unknown died and that would’ve thrown a wrench into things. I’m mixed on the ending, but I do think it helps justify the story’s existence as science fiction as opposed to fantasy. Not perfect, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about for the couple days since I had read it. Also a good starting point for getting into Kuttner/Moore collabs.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “First Fire” by Terry Bisson

February 10th, 2024

(Cover by John Berkey. SF Age, September 1998.)

Who Goes There?

Terry Bisson, unlike a lot of authors, started out as a novelist before working his way “down” to short stories—a good move, given the latter is where his legacy now rests. His story “Bears Discover Fire” is one of only three to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award; and it has the unique honor of being the first story I reviewed for this site. Can you believe that was a year and a half ago? It’s (in my opinion) one of the few certified classics of SFF short fiction to come out since 1990, and the thing is, there’s more where that came from. Sadly Bisson died last month (exactly to the day, as it turns out), and now the field is forevermore deprived one of its best short fiction writers. “First Fire” has a few issues which I’ll get to, but it does show off Bisson’s feverish and witty potential as a short story craftsman. I suspect there are worse stories I could’ve picked as a way of paying tribute to one of the field’s unsung heroes.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age, which is on the Archive. It has only been reprinted in English once, in the Bisson collection In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories.

Enhancing Image

Emil is a young scientist with an invention, a “spectrachronograph,” which can trace the age of a flame down to the second. This may sound incredibly niche, but consider that while flames often may last a few hours, or a few days, a flame without enough care and cultural significance could last for years—possibly centuries. Certainly fire carries a lot of implicit meanings, from man often being said to have risen above his fellow mammals when he discovered fire to the Olympics having a literal passing of the torch. There’s some value in aging flames that, if genuine, could tell humans a little about their own history. The Tycoon (he might have a name, but I forget, and anyway the story always calls him that) takes a keen interest in Emil’s invention, which he insists on calling a “time-gun.” That Emil’s device is not a gun makes the new name a bit humorous, but it also foreshadows what kind of person the Tycoon is. Together they travel to the Middle East, to put Emil’s so-called time-gun to the test: aging the Flame of Zoroaster, which should be several centuries old if genuine.

(I just wanna point out that I worried at first if this story was too short to really dig into, since it only takes up a few pages in Science Fiction Age. For better or worse this magazine’s type size was meant for insects, so a lot of wordage can be fit on the page. Still, Bisson covers a good deal of ground, hopping from scene to scene, in about 4,000 words.)

We meet a few other characters, namely Kay, an assistant working on the Tycoon’s digging project. Emil and Kay quickly develop a friends-with-benefits relationship wherein, somehow, Kay has a long-distance boyfriend and is also fucking the Tycoon, which Emil doesn’t seem to mind. The characters more serve the themes of the story than work as people with interiority and what have you, but Kay definitely draws the short stick even by this standard. There’s also a colleague of Kay’s, Claude, a black Frenchman who is intentionally written as pretentious and randomly injecting French words into his English. But ultimately there’s Emil, the scientist, the man of discovery, who becomes quite rich from his dealings with the Tycoon, who, in turn, literally buys out the Flame of Zoroaster and ships it to the US. The Tycoon compares himself to Alexander the Great, and even his underlings seem to think of him as a modern-day conqueror. Of course, what we’re told about Alexander within the story does not show him in the best light; rather it emphasizes Alexander as a destroyer—a man who, despite having died so young, crushed entire cultures underfoot and turned them to dust. The Tycoon shows a similar irreverence with other cultures, which should be a warning sign for Emil. Alas…

Calling “First Fire” science fiction might be a bit of a stretch, since it is very much couched more in mythology than any real science, despite the utility of Emil’s time-gun. The Tycoon is not a real person, but a stand-in for the ultra-wealthy as a whole, and Emil is not a real person either when you get down to it, but a stand-in for the kind of person who is brilliant at one specific thing and a total dumbass in every other part of his life. He’s a fine inventor but he is tragically unable to foresee how his invention might be abused. And then there’s Kay, who has it the worst. If you’ve read enough of Robert Silverberg’s material, especially his “peak” era of the late ’60s to the mid-’70s, then you become familiar with how Silverberg wrote women at that point in his career. Which is to say, not very well. You get used to it, but it’s a weird caveat to make. Bisson, who doesn’t strike me as a horndog like young Silverberg (or indeed middle-aged Silverberg), pulls some “she breasted boobily” nonsense with Kay and it was something that stopped me in my tracks a few times as I was reading. Don’t get me wrong, this is still not as bad as Piers Anthony on a good day; but it dampens what is otherwise a fairly serious narrative, about something as grandiose as the birth of the human race. Also, Claude is annoying.

I’m quibbling, and admittedly part of that is I waited too long to write about “First Fire” after I had read it. Nobody’s fault but mine. I procrastinated but then got called into work much earlier than expected and now I’m getting this review out at the last minute. This story has soured a bit for me in parts, although interestingly the ending has gone up in my estimation, despite my kneejerk reaction to it. Another thing is that I didn’t understand at first that we’re not supposed to take all this on a literal level, but are meant to take it as allegorical. I wish Bisson only called Emil the Scientist within the story (like in the introductory blurb), because it would’ve made such a reading easier to discern. This is a tragic tale about how wealth can (and often does) corrupt science, and how scientists have a moral obligation to their discoveries and inventions. Kurt Vonnegut cooks this theme to perfection in Cat’s Cradle, and Bisson here makes a solid go at it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The Tycoon and company next head to Africa, to a temple alleged to keep the oldest ongoing flame in human history—a flame so old that it might actually predate homo sapiens. True enough, when Emil use his time-gun on the flame, it turns out to be over 800,000 years old. The Tycoon seems to be fascinated by this, only for him to reach forth and—without anyone noticing at first—extinguish the flame with his fingertips. He has snuffed out the oldest flame in the world, and for what purpose? Everyone is justifiably outraged, but whilst Emil and Claud go to beat the Tycoon, possibly to death, something far grander in scale is happening at the same time. “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out, one by one.” The Tycoon, without having any way of knowing this in advance, has not only brought about the end of the world but caused the universe to reset itself. This is about as apocalypse an ending as is conceivable.

To point out the elephant in the room, the ending is one big shoutout to Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God,” with that aforementioned quote being taken almost word-for-word from Clarke’s story. Now, I’m sorry to be spoiling a short story that is not only very old by now but one of the most famous in the genre’s history, but my initial reaction to this homage, and Bisson’s choice to end his own story like this, was tinged with disgust. Maybe “disgust” is too strong a word. Obviously Bisson had by this point earned the right to reference such a beloved story, and to reappropriate that story’s ending. A bit of a hot take, but I’ve never been a fan of Clarke’s story, although I was also not big on “The Star” when I finally read it. “The Nine Billion Names of God” is an ideas story, without a real plot or characters; it’s an idea (a pretty good one) punctuated with one of the most famous short story endings of all time. But that’s all it really is: half a dozen pages containing a setup and a punchline. This works for a lot of people, evidently, but often I require at least a bit more substance in my short fiction. “First Fire” is a more flawed story than “The Nine Billion Names of God,” but it does have more material. Bisson wanted to build on top of Clarke’s premise and he basically succeeded.

A Step Farther Out

“First Fire” is tangentially SFnal, but it registers more strongly as a borderline fantasy allegory. The introductory blurb hints that this is not a realistic tale, but an allegorical one, with characters fitting into certain archetypes in order for Bisson to make a certain point. The ending certainly makes it hard to take as straight science fiction, even if it’s a transparent reference to one of the all-time classic SF stories. Even though it was published in 1998, and even though Bisson is a very different writer from Robert Silverberg, it does read in part like an homage to early ’70s Silverberg. How much you’ll enjoy that will depend on how much you like early ’70s Silverberg and how well you can cope with his shortcomings.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Human Operators” by Harlan Ellison and A. E. van Vogt

February 6th, 2024

(Cover by Vaughn Bodé. F&SF, January 1971.)

Who Goes There?

Harlan Ellison is one of the most (in)famous writers of SFF, and he managed this despite never having written an SFF novel and being swamped controversy throughout most of his career. He’s a bit of a character, let’s put it that way. You’re probably more likely to talk with someone who knows of Ellison by way of reputation than someone who has read any of his fiction. A minor shame, because Ellison at his best is pretty good. It’s hard now to understand that Ellison, in the ’60s and ’70s, was really something special, a hot-blooded trailblazer the likes of which the field had not seen before. One of the few Ellison works still in print is his anthology Dangerous Visions, which had assembled an all-star team of writers to provide new stories that were unlikely to see magazine publication. Unfortunately Ellison’s career as an editor was short-lived, as he was never able to get far on The Last Dangerous Visions, which is now being resurrected (in a form totally divorced from what Ellison probably envisioned) by J. Michael Straczynski, who is now apparently handling the Ellison estate.

A. E. van Vogt is another writer who found himself steeped in controversy, although this time it was very much not to his benefit. Van Vogt was one of the most popular writers—even being on par with Robert Heinlein—in the ’40s, and like early Heinlein his work became associated with John W. Campbell when he was at the height of his powers. Then the ’50s happened, and while we would see some books from van Vogt, these were fix-ups of material that had already been published. Between 1952 and 1962 van Vogt did not write any wholly original fiction, and this hiatus happened because he spent that time shilling Dianetics. This, combined with criticism from some well-established writers, made van Vogt an incredibly divisive figure, and even today sparks debate among old-school readers as to whether van Vogt was sometimes great or if he always sucked. I personally like van Vogt—when he’s good. Ellison clearly thought of van Vogt as an inspirational figure, even bullying the SFWA into making him a Grand Master at a time when his reputation was at rock bottom.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It would’ve preceded the publication of Partners in Wonder by about a month, given the nature of magazine printings. It’s also been anthologized a decent number of times, appearing in the first annual Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year (ed. Lester del Rey) and The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg). Something I’ve noticed is that nearly all of Ellison’s work (even the famous stuff) seems to have gone out of print after his died, and Partners in Wonder is no exception.

Enhancing Image

Some context. Ellison came to van Vogt with the idea of wanting to write a story together, although at the outset he didn’t have an outline or even a title for it. Soon he came up with the title, which van Vogt immediately liked, and then he came up with the basic idea for it. Van Vogt would then write stretches of the story but then leave gaps in the narrative where he felt Ellison could do a better job, and this is where Ellison came in. When introducing the story in Partners in Wonder, Ellison is deliberately unclear as to who wrote what sections, and indeed for the most part it’s hard to tell if a given passage is Ellison or van Vogt’s doing; there is one specific section that I suspect was Ellison’s handiwork, but we’ll get to that. Despite having come up with the title, premise, and having put the finishing touches on it, this feels less like an Ellison story and more like a van Vogt story that Ellison spiced up a little in parts. I’m not sure if Ellison wanted to write a van Vogt-type story from the start or if it just turned out that way.

The set-up is pretty abstract. The narrator (never named) is a teen boy who has been living on Ship by himself for a minute now, after Ship killed his father. Ship doesn’t have a name, properly speaking; that’s just what the narrator calls it. Ship is an AI, fully conscious, that can take care of itself to a degree, but while it’s able, for instance, to abuse the narrator physically, it does not have the faculties to repair itself. When I first read this story I thought the narrator was fourteen years old, but while he’s still definitely a teenager, it’s clear he “was” fourteen when his father died and is now at least somewhat older. You’d think the narrator would hold a serious grudge against Ship for the dad-killing, but then again the boy has only known two people in his life: his dad, and Ship. “Ship is always with me, even when I sleep. Especially when I sleep.” The world of the ship, which is otherwise totally vacant, is the only one the boy has known since birth; he doesn’t even know who his mother is. It’s clear that Ship holds no affection for the boy—that the boy is only allowed to be here because without him the ship would inevitably fall apart at the seams. The place is big enough to house a few hundred people, but for some reason it’s all empty.

One day, however, Ship calls the narrator to get a certain job done, which he had never done before. It has something to do with reparing something in the control room—not the bridge, but a dark room where Ship keeps in touch with others of its kind. It’s called the “intermind,” and despite covering an unfathomable distance, the AIs of the ships keep in touch. It’s here that the narrator finds out why exactly Ship is mostly empty, and why he’s being kept here despite Ship’s apparent disdain for humans. Many years ago, the ships, called Starfighters, were constructed as warships, and were sent to fight in another galaxy. There are 99 of these ships, each housing hundreds of humans. “The Human Operators” answers an obvious question that should arise when discussing true AIs, namely, “What if an AI doesn’t like the job it was designed to do?” In this case the question is a bit more specific: “What if an AI was made to manage a warship, but finds the prospect of waging war for humans repulsive?” So the ships conspired to invoke partial power failure, starving the humans inside to death and only sparing the bare minimum needed to keep shit running. The narrator thinks, correctly, that there will come a time when he will no longer be needed and Ship will have him killed, like his father before him.

But first he must have offspring of his own.

“The Human Operators” is barely long enough to qualify as a novelette, and as such there’s a good deal of backstory that’s hinted at but not elaborated on too much (good), along with some technical questions that go unanswered (bad). For example, Ship killed hundreds of people at least half a century ago. Where did all the bodies go? It’s unclear how much the ships are able to do on their own, since they’re capable of torturing their human captives, but do not have the capacity for self-repair. Has no one tried searching for a hundred no-doubt highly valuable warships that went AWOL? Did no one think it was a bad idea to give a fully conscious AI control of a ship that could travel halfway across the galaxy in the wrong direction? This last one is a bit unfair: we know, from real-world cases, that people are really fucking stupid even with machine learning, i.e., pseudo-AI. But even in a hypothetical future where the Marathon games never existed, what is to stop a being capable of making complex decisions from, for example, killing its own crew on a whim? What is to stop an AI that lords over a pocket world like a generation ship from having delusions of godhood?

Again, not really criticizing the story on that front, if only because (sadly) it could very well happen in the real world. I don’t usually say this, but I feel like this story could’ve afforded to be a couple thousand worlds longer, if only to flesh out the inner workings of the ships; granted, Ellison and van Vogt are not technical-minded writers and they were probably not very interested in the mechanics of their material. What the story does do well is perpetuate a sense of intrigue, of evoking gaps in a much larger narrative that we’re compelled the fill in ourselves, and it’s a story that, more than anything, works on a borderline allegorical level. None of the characters have names. Ship is Starfighter 31. And then there’s the girl Ship pairs the narrator with, who is from Starfighter 88. Ship gives the narrator (who, remember, has never had any human contact other than his dad) very textbook instructions on what to do with the girl, and I have to admit this section of the story is a little funny. At least some of it is intentional. “I thought ‘getting her a baby’ would mean going into the stores,” the narrator tells us. I suspect the sex scene was Ellison’s doing. Right, there’s a sex scene. It’s fine, it’s not that cringe-inducing, played more for awkward humor than titillation. You started to see a lot more stuff like this in genre SF at the time.

The narrator and girl don’t seem to enjoy their intimate time together (Ship makes them do it every day for three weeks, if I remember right), and what’s curious is that they don’t fall in love (I’m not even sure they know the concept of romance) but they do become friends. I mentioned the sex scene, but I also think Ellison was generally in charge of writing the scenes with the girl. Don’t ask me how I figure this, I just know these things. I don’t mean this necessarily in a bad way: Ellison can be shit at writing women (so can van Vogt, but in a different way), but here he and van Vogt do an okay job. A collaboration between Harlan Ellison and post-hiatus A. E. van Vogt sounds like it should be a disaster, but surprisingly, while it’s by no means a masterpiece, “The Human Operators” presents a cohesive narrative (albeit with a few hanging questions) and a few interesting ideas, including a bit of moral ambivalence I did not expect. The ships are very much precursors to the likes of Marathon and Durandal, and I suspect there’s even a bit of AM in their DNA, but they were not totally unjustified in going rogue and killing the humans onboard. True, the ships are using the surviving humans as slave labor, but the ships themselves were built to assist in mass murder and possibly genocide. The ships needing human hands to keep them in shape will also ultimately spell doom for them.

There Be Spoilers Here

The narrator and girl conspire to disable Ship, and possibly convince humans on other ships to revolt against their masters. What the ships should’ve anticipated but didn’t is that if you’re abusing your work force, you best hope the workers don’t know exactly how to take you apart. Despite Ship’s efforts, accelerating and decelerating rapidly in the hopes of crushing the narrator to death, Our Hero™ manages to get the job done, shutting down the AI while keeping the ship functional. You could say there’s a successful mutiny on the ship, with the narrator even convincing the girl to stay on Starfighter 31, and ultimately they land on a habitable planet (possibly Earth, I’m not sure) that one of the other ships had been talking about in a nostalgic way. Certainly there’s a more bittersweet ending lurking in here, and if anything I think they authors could’ve leaned more on the moral greyness of the whole conflict. After all, “viciousness,” in this story, positively correlates with intelligence: the ships are highly intelligent, and therefore ruthless, while the narrator has to become more ruthless himself as he learns more about the ships. It could be that the two writers’ views on intelligence’s relationship with morality are conflicting here.

Incidentally, this story would’ve seen print nine or ten months prior to the Attica revolt. Remember, a lot of so-called good Christians believe implicitly that slavery is justified under the “right” circumtances. If you do something the government doesn’t like, or are even suspected of doing something wrong, you could serve a mandatory minimum sentence and be cut off from the outside world except for what the government allows you to see. You could be made a member of the criminal class for the non-crime of smoking weed or injecting heroin into your veins. You could be coerced into giving a false confession and made to live on death row, for a crime you did not commit, for thirty years. As the AI of Starfighter 31 is dying, one of the other ships posits that maybe dying isn’t so bad, if it means no longer being a slave—that slavery is such a heinous crime upon another sentient being that death might be preferable to it. What the story implies but which its human characters are incapable of articulating is that there is no “right” circumstance for slavery. In this sense the ships (having no choice but to need human slaves) are villainous, but also tragic.

A Step Farther Out

A collaboration between Ellison and van Vogt should not have worked, from a certain angle. These are men who, for better or worse, were prone to indulging their subconscious during the writing process, usually more id than ego, the result being that their writing at its worst can be sheer nonsense. But, maybe it’s the chance to work with one of his idols that made him act his best, Ellison came through, somehow fying through van Vogt’s gravitational pull and coming out in one piece. As for van Vogt, it’s like we got a glimpse of the classic, popular, pre-hiatus writer who held himself down long enough to realize such gems as “Enchanted Village” and “Far Centaurus.” It’s not an effort that brings out the best in its contributors so much as it (mostly) does away with their worst habits.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Lorelei of the Red Mist” by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury

February 3rd, 2024

(Cover by Chester Martin. Planet Stories, Summer 1946.)

Who Goes There?

Leigh Brackett debuted in 1940, with her first couple stories being printed in Astounding, but quickly she found other magazines more enticing despite the smaller paycheck. She stopped submitting to John W. Campbell for the same reason her future husband Edmond Hamilton did: creative differences. Campbell wanted science fiction of a new, more technical, more cerebral sort, while Bracket and Hamilton were devotees of a school of adventure fiction that predates Campbellian SF. Brackett, by her own admission, was also pretty indifferent to keeping up with real-world scientific discoveries. It might be considered strange, then, that nowadays Brackett is most known for her post-nuclear novel The Long Tomorrow and her work as a screenwriter. She also wrote a fair amount of detective fiction, which does show its influence in her SF somewhat. She wrote the first draft of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back in the last months of her life, which saw her return to her planetary romance roots.

Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous writers in all American literature, especially for his novel Fahrenheit 451 and his fix-up “novel” The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury didn’t think of himself as an SF writer and it’s probably best, if anything, to understand much of his fiction with a horror lends; indeed his first collection, Dark Carnival, was horror-focused. In the ’50s Bradbury would gain mainstream recognition, but in the ’40s he was a fledgling short story writer and fan, with Brackett and Henry Kuttner (who were only five years older than Bradbury) acting as mentors. “Lorelei of the Red Mist” is a Brackett story at heart, but for better or worse Brackett was unable to finish it before trying her luck at screenwriting, leaving Bradbury to write the second half of the novella by himself. For what it’s worth I think Bradbury did a good job paying respect to Brackett’s style, although even without the latter’s word on who did what it’s not hard to figure out where the Bradbury part of the story begins.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted a fair number of times, including in Three Times Infinity (ed. Leo Margulies), The Best of Planet Stories #1 (ed. Leigh Brackett), The Great SF Stories Volume 8 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), Echoes of Valor II (ed. Karl Edward Wagner), and the Brackett collection Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances. This is all for collecting’s sake since you can read the story for free on Project Gutenberg. Sadly there was never a sequel to that Planet Stories anthology.

Enhancing Image

Hugh ~~Mongous~~ Starke is a space robber who has made off with the biggest pile of money he’ll probably ever see in his life—only he’s on the run from authorities and it looks like he won’t live much longer. Indeed it doesn’t take long for a mishap with his ship to send his body packing, although his mind proves to be much more resilient. Left dying on Venus, Starke is confronted by a strange woman named Rann, who has the power to spare Starke and give him a new body if only he would hold up his end of a certain deal. Rann is a sorceress, the Lorelei of the title (I thought for a while it was the name of a character, but it’s referring to Rann and her role as a sort of temptress), who has powers beyond Starke’s understanding. Starke gets his new body, but he quickly finds he’s been thrown into a conflict he can scarcely fathom, among people who want him dead.

A while ago I reviewed Brackett’s “Enchantress of Venus,” one in a series starring the futuristic barbarian Eric John Stark (Starke and Stark are very different characters, I might add), and Brackett’s Venus in both stories very much takes after early 20th century depictions of the planet. Even in 1946 the Venus of this story must’ve seemed a little far-fetched. Think Zelazny’s “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.” It’s not exactly hospitable, but it’s livable for humans who are tough enough; there’s local wildlife, and as expected this Venus is swampy, with the Red Sea (the red mist of the title) being home to a very dense gas as opposed to water. The gas is dense enough to buoy ships but breathable enough that a human could traverse the bottom for several hours without scuba gear. This is all stuff Starke will learn much later but which will be familiar to those of us who have read one or two of Brackett’s Venus stories before.

Starke’s mind has been transplanted to the body of Conan, a warrior who has been kept in chains (“Starke’s new body wore a collar, like a vicious dog.”) and tortured in the dark corridors of Crom Dhu, an island surrounded by the Red Sea and connected to the mainland only with a jetty. Crom Dhu is home to the Rovers, a group of humans (like Starke) who, unlike Our Anti-Hero™, have stuck to a borderline medieval way of living. There’s Romna, the local bard, and Faolan, the leader of the pack who has been rendered blind, both literally and with hatred for Conan. Then there’s Beudag, Faolan’s sister and, as it turns out, Conan’s lover—or rather former lover. Conan, despite being one of the Rovers, has been tortured because he betrayed his own people in a recent battle: he was set to marry Beudag but turned his back on her in favor of Rann. It’s unclear if Conan had planned this from the start or if Rann had put some kind of spell on him. He would’ve run off with the sorceress had he not been captured, and apparently Conan’s mind broke under the torture (possibly also combined with guilt), making his body an ideal vessel for Rann to slip Starke’s mind into it.

To get the obvious out of the way, this is in part a Conan homage. The fact that the Rover hideout is called Crom Dhu doesn’t help. Something clever Brackett does is that she makes the protagonist a typical space opera character (a lovable rogue in the mode of Han Solo, you could say) and puts him in the body of a sword-and-sorcery hero. Eric John Stark takes after Conan (not to mention Tarzan) while Hugh Starke is basically a civilized man (albeit a remorseless criminal), only he’s been thrown into a scenario that would not be unusual for Robert E. Howard to conceive. We also don’t get to know much about the Conan of Brackett’s story, since his consciousness is MIA (although not as absent as was first thought, as we’ll discover later) and he can’t get a word in edgewise. The other characters tell us what sort of man Conan was like and it’s up to Starke to fill in the blanks; he’ll have to do his homework pretty quick, after all, or else he might get killed by one of the Rovers who are out for vengeance. Faolan suspects Starke might be an agent for Rann—a rational concern, considering Rann does want Starke to destroy the Rovers from the inside.

To complicate things further, Beudag clearly misses her former lover, and seeing him returned to a somewhat normal state (or rather seeing his body again inhabited by a working mind) immediately draws her to Starke. Starke is similarly taken with Beudag, who is a warrior lady who could probably crush his head with her thighs. Romance is not exactly Brackett’s strong suit (I remember criticizing the romantic aspect of her Eric John Stark stories that I’ve read), but the off-the-cuff romance in “Lorelei of the Red Mist” feels more justified since Starke is in the body of a man who was in love with Beudag, and he eventually finds that his memories are actually becoming intertwined with Conan’s, on top of Rann’s power over him. This story apparently drew some controversy among the Planet Stories readership for its overt (for 1946 pulp fiction) sexuality, and true enough Brackett and Bradbury are eager to describe human nudity (both male and female) in as much detail as was possible under the circumstances. It’s also unambiguous that both Beudag and Rann find Conan (or rather his body) very attractive. This is not just titilation. There’s some irony in the fact that Starke has a strong mind but originally had a weak body, while Conan has a strong body (even under torture) but a relatively weak mind.

But wait, there’s more! There’s a threeway conflict going on. There’s the humans, the sea-people who dwell in the Red Sea (they’re humanoid but they have gills and thin webbing between their fingers and such), and Rann’s people, who are descended from the sea-people and are apparently racist toward their own ancestors. All three sides hate each other, but right now shit is not looking good for the humans, as Crom Dhu has been under siege and there’s no way of getting off the island. The island is fortified such that Rann’s people will have a hard time getting in, but Faolan’s people can’t get out, and if Faolan dies then the humans will have no choice but to surrender. All Starke would have to do is kill Faolan and Rann will get what she wants and Starke will get his million credits. Rann is held up in the city of Falga, and there was a battle there recently that left the humans retreating and Conan becoming a traitor. There’s a whole backstory that’s partly given to us through exposition but which remains partly up to the reader’s imagination, the result being that Brackett (and I say her specifically since she wrote the first half and thus did most of the legwork with world-building) makes the world of the story feel bigger than it is.

There Be Spoilers Here

Starke, under the influence of Rann, nearly kills Faolan, Romna, and Beudag before being “rescued” by Rann’s people. The deal was that if Starke did what he was supposed to then he would get a million credits, but obviously Rann has no intent of actually following through on this, resulting in Starke narrowly surviving the double-cross and retreating into the Red Sea. It’s at this point that the story takes an unusual turn, and this is because Bradbury is now in control. Brackett said she didn’t know where the story was heading when she passed the torch to Bradbury, and admittedly you can still predict the rest in broad strokes. The details are what matter, though. The story doesn’t descend into horror exactly but it does get noticeably spookier, and the language becomes a bit more poetic as well. (I don’t see Brackett using “ebon” as frequently as Bradbury does here.) Bradbury does his best to mesh with Brackett’s style, but still there’s a switching of gears that you’d probably notice even if you didn’t know the nature of this collaboration. The SFnal part of the story was already tenuous, but by the time Bradbury takes over it has all but evaporated. I do like the idea, however, that within the bast universe of this distant future, with his spaceships and laser beams, that there are pockets of civilization that lag centuries behind that future. The Rovers, for example, have no issue with slavery, nor do they seem to have any weaponry that’s on par with even 20th century American standards. Jack Vance would basically make a whole career on such far-future medievalism.

At the bottom of the Red Sea, Starke comes across a pack of hounds, and a shepherd, one of the sea-people who apparently has the power to bring the dead back to life—not to their full selves, but as zombies. This is something that was not alluded to at all previously. The sea-people wanna use an army of the undead to take both Crom Dhu and Falga, which naturally doesn’t please Starke. Using a nigh invincible army would be nice, but Beudag has been taken hostage by Rann and Starke does feel that he ought to redeem himself in the eyes of the Rovers. It could also be that his personality has meshed with that of Conan’s to the point where he’s seeing himself in Conan’s shoes. “That part of him that was Conan cried out. Conan was so much of him and he so much of Conan it was impossible for a cleavage.” He manages to convince the shepherd to at least have the sea-people strike Falga first, to buy the Rovers time and maybe convince the sea-people that they have a common enemy! Which works! Although the ensuing battle at Falga—really a massacre more than a real battle—is depicted as horribly grotesque. “It was very simple and very unpleasant.” Still, he convinces the sea-people to spare Crom Dhu the same fate. The climax of “Lorelei of the Red Mist” has Starke do the typical heroic things, like rescuing Beudag, saving Crom Dhu, and killing Rann, but it’s also about him coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer entirely Hugh Starke, but “Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan,” host to that second personality and vicariously offering Conan the chance to redeem himself. Starke eventually finds his old body and gives it a proper burial, saying goodbye to his old self literally but metaphorically also saying goodbye to his former life as a rogue. He will work to become an honorable warrior now, with Beudag (who is in love with both Starke and Conan) at his side.

A Step Farther Out

This is a very interesting story, even if it is structurally wonky. It doesn’t help also that I was very tired (from work and a sprained ankle denying me much-wanted sleep) when I was reading it. It does seem a bit long in the tooth, not helped by the obvious divide between the Brackett and Bradbury material. At the same time this is exactly the sort of story that would never see print in Astounding, because it’s a little too fun-loving, a little too horror-inflected, a little too unscientific, and a little too erotically charged. Despite taking place on the same version of Venus as the aforementioned “Enchantress of Venus” this feels less like Edgar Rice Burroughs and more like Robert E. Howard, which of course is not a bad thing! (Makes me wonder what might’ve happened had Howard lived to see the sword-and-planet boom of the ’40s and early ’50s.) If you’re interested in old-school planetary romance, something which predates Dune and which is a lot less sophisticated but also less heady than Herbert’s take, this is a good start.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: February 2024

February 1st, 2024
(Cover by Edward Valigursky. Amazing Stories, May 1959.)

It’s February, and 29 days instead of the usual 28—not like that makes a difference for my review schedule. It’s the time of one of my least favorite holidays: Valentine’s Day. I just ignored it last year, but this time I figured I may as well have some fun with the timing of it. Originally I was gonna tackle all collaborative stories this month, as a gimmick. After all, it takes two to tango, and authors working together can sometimes bring out the best in each other. Indeed for the collaborations I decided to go for different types of collaborative relationship: mentor and apprentice (Brackett and Bradbury), siblings (the Strugatsky brothers), an emerging master and his idol (Ellison and van Vogt), young lovers (Tuttle and Martin), and an actual married couple (Kuttner and Moore). It’s a fun idea!

Unfortunately I did say “originally” because tragedy struck the field last month: we lost some our most talented writers. Within the span of a week Terry Bisson, Howard Waldrop, and Tom Purdom died. I was gonna wait until April to do this, but I realized that with the way things have been going we might lose a few more major talents in the interim. This may sound cynical, but I wanted to strike while the iron was hot. It also lets me not have to comb too hard for collaborative stories.

For the novellas:
1. “Lorelei of the Red Mist” by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury. From the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories. The logical heir apparent to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Brackett’s influence on the planetary romance can’t be overlooked. I need not tell you about Bradbury. Despite being only five years his senior and debuting around the same time, Brackett acted as a mentor figure to Bradbury. It’s probably not a coincidence both were Planet Stories regulars in the late ’40s.
2. “The Storms of Windhaven” by Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin. From the May 1975 issue of Analog Science Fiction. This is a reread, but you know how I feel about rereads. Tuttle is known for her horror, but she has also dabbled in SF, and I can guess how she contributed to the Windhaven stories. I don’t need to introduce Martin. They were lovers in the early ’70s, and were probably still together when they came up with the Windhaven setting.
For the short stories:
1. “The Human Operators” by Harlan Ellison and A. E. van Vogt. From the January 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The first of the two Ellison collaborations, although it was actually the last released, its magazine publication being pretty much simultaneous with Partners in Wonder. Ellison thought the world of van Vogt, even bullying the SFWA into making him a Grand Master.
2. “First Fire” by Terry Bisson. From the September 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. Bion has the unique honor of being the first author whose work I reviewed on this site, that being his legendary story “Bears Discover Fire.” Bisson started out as a novelist but is probably now more remembered for his short fiction, with short but densely packed stories like “macs” and “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
3. “What You Need” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. From the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Short Story. It’s hard to overstate how great Kuttner and Moore were together in the ’40s, and also how prolific. My quest to cover as many Twilight Zone stories as I can continues, as “What You Need” was turned into a classic TZ episode of the same name.
4. “Initiative” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. From the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories. Translated by Harmon Rutley. The Strugatsky brothers were, aside from Yevgeny Zamyatin, the first Russian authors to leave an impression on American genre SF; mind you this was during the Cold War. Their novel Roadside Picnic is one of the most famous non-English SF novels, as well as the inspiration for Stalker.
5. “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” by Howard Waldrop. From the August 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Unlike Bisson, Waldrop seemed to think himself much more keen on short fiction, with only one solo novel being published and at least one more supposed to have been written but never seeing print. He’s probably most known for his seminal alternate history story “The Ugly Chickens.”
6. “Reduction in Arms” by Tom Purdom. From the August 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Despite having debuted in the ’50s, Purdom was one of those writers who really came into his own in the ’60s, when the New Wave was in full bloom and the market for genre SF had become more permissive. Purdom remained active for over sixty years, and his absence is sorely felt.
Not much else to say. Next month, as I said not long ago, we’ll be covering all short stories, all from F&SF, and all from the ’50s. February is another roster of novellas and short stories, but with a twist.

Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “The Agony of the Leaves” by Evelyn E. Smith

January 31st, 2024

(Cover by Vidmer. Beyond Fantasy Fiction, July 1954.)

Who Goes There?

We don’t know a lot about Evelyn E. Smith (not to be confused with Edward E. Smith), which unfortunately is not unusual for women in pre-New Wave SF, and incidentally she had mostly stepped away from the field by the time the New Wave and second-wave feminism kicked in. Her story is very much like what you’ve come to expect with female SFF authors in the ’50s: she would mostly give up short fiction to focus on novels. Hey, that’s where the money is! It’s a shame, because this is my first story of hers and I’m already looking forward to more stuff of hers. “The Agony of the Leaves” is very much emblematic of the kind of fantasy H. L. Gold wanted printed in the short-lived Beyond Fantasy Fiction, and I mean that in a good way. This is a fun yarn that doesn’t take itself very seriously.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1954 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. It’s been reprinted a total of one time, in Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957). The editor isn’t credited, but seeing as I am friends with a few of the people involved, I can make an educated guess on who the culprit is. Also strange to see “The Agony of the Leaves” included here since it’s urban fantasy and not SF.

Enhancing Image

Ernest is a freelance tea master (I guess they had fictional jobs that don’t exist in the ’50s) who has to live with two women fighting over him—both of whom are witches. Mrs. Greenhut (whatever happened to Mr. Greenhut is never disclosed, although Ernest has his theories) and Ms. Levesque are not the most charming or kind-hearted women, but what they lack of decency they make up for in assertiveness. Ms. Levesque has been giving Ernest love potions while Mrs. Greenhut has been giving him love cookies. “[Ms. Levesque]—both of them—were so careless with other people’s property, as well as with other people themselves.” The two women were once friends but now fight as rivals over Ernest. That Ernest is being fought over by two powerful women and is also able to afford rent with his non-job immediately tells us this is a fantasy, never mind the witch part. Then there’s Nadia, an Eastern European woman whom Ernest has the hots for, and this conflict makes him worry and wonder as to what’s to be done about the witches. So we have what you might call a love square at the heart of it, with Ernest trying to get it with Nadia while also trying to make her understand that two witches are tormenting him.

Getting the obvious out of the way, I’m not sure if Smith would’ve read Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife when she wrote this story. Sure, the magazine version of Conjure Wife would’ve been a decade old at this point, but I have no clue if Smith would’ve read the issue of Unknown it appeared it, and then there’s the fact that Leiber’s novel didn’t see book publication until right before Smith would’ve presumably written her story. A recurring criticism of Leiber’s novel is that it operates on the (admittedly absurd) notion that women are witches; not that witches are women (as they tend to be depicted), but that every other woman in the world is secretly a witch. Achievements that men take for their own are actually the workings of their witch wives, which means (of course Leiber didn’t intend this implication) that women are reponsible for holding up patriarchy. It’s a hurdle to get over, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to have fun at all. Smith’s story seems to be in conversation with Leiber’s; after all, all the women with speaking roles in the story are either witches or suspected to be witches. Unlike the protagonist of Conjure Wife, who makes the uncomfortable discovery that his wife is a witch, Ernest starts out as knowledgable about witchcraft and wants desperately to return to normalcy—whatever that is.

(By the way, the title is a reference to tea-making, “the unfolding of the leaves when boiling water’s poured on them.” Ernest is apparently eager to tell everyone about his tea-making knowledge, and there are even hints that he’s the 1950s equivalent of a weeaboo. Of course it’s also a pun, given how much Ernest suffers here.)

So there are two driving questions: How do we get rid of these witches? And is Nadia a witch herself? When Ernesst and takes Nadia out to dinner, the witches try to ruin the date, and they try pretty hard; but for some reason their magic tricks have no effect on Nadia, who either doessn’t notice or mistakes Ernest’s blubberings for some psychological thing. Nadia herself is a funny character: she talks in butchered English and is weirdly preoccupied with psychoanalysis. Everything that happens to Ernest (according to Nadia) can be explained by either mania or hallucinations. Nadia isn’t even sure these women exist, despite them living in the same apartment building as Ernest. Is Nadia gaslighting Ernest or is she genuinely clueless? It gets to the point where even Mrs. Greenhut and Ms. Levesque are unsure if Nadia is a witch even more powerful than either of them, which leads them ultimately to joining forces—if for no other reason than to get Ernest out of the clutches of this foreign lady. “The Agony of the Leaves” is a novelette that moves at a breakneck pace, such that you probably don’t realize we’re already approaching the climax when Ernest takes Nadia out on that date. Smith has a way with snappy dialogue that makes everything at the very least entertaining.

There Be Spoilers Here

The ending is pretty good. It’s not confirmed if Nadia is a witch or not but it’s implied she’s a normal-ish person, who just so happens to be way more charming than the witches. Ernest ultimately decides that it doesn’t really matter if Nadia is a witch or not, because he’s under a different kind of spell, if we’re to take Nadia as emblematic of the then-modern woman. It’s subversive because we were led to believe that, given her heritage and her unusual behavior, Nadia is a witch of an even older breed than Greenhut and Levesque. There’s an unspoken rule that Eastern European characters are written as prone to a certain pre-Christian mysticism. The two witches admit, however, that they’ve lost this battle. Smith might be saying something about the superficial nature of a lot of relationships, or she could be having fun with it. This is a pretty cynical ending that could take a legitimately dark turn if it wasn’t the ending to a comedy.

A Step farther Out

On the one hand there’s not too much to say about the story itself, but does there need to be? It’s a frivolous satire, of the kind Gold liked, but it does that job with a fun-loving nature that doesn’t read as phoned-in; rather it seems like Smith genuinely liked to play into Gold’s brand of comedy. I never laughed out loud, but I did chuckle a few times and I was smirking for much of it. You could very easily turn this premise into something unfunny and offensive, and in the hands of a male writer from that period (including, sad to say, Leiber) it could’ve been that. A shame this one had to languish in limbo for over half a century; it’s a fun read.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Automatic Rifleman” by David Drake

January 27th, 2024

(Cover by Vincent Di Fate. Destinies, Fall 1980.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve covered David Drake before, with his dinosaur time travel novella “Time Safari,” and while I wasn’t a fan of that story it did succeed in making me curious about Drake’s work. Sadly Drake passed away in the interim, and what struck me about people’s reactions to this was that Drake was a pretty uncontroversial figure despite being a pioneering writer of military SF, never mind a heavy contributor to the Baen stable. He was maybe (I’m not sure, truth be told) on the conservative side, but he wasn’t a raging bigot and he didn’t seem to have crackpot theories about the environment or the government or what have you. Reading his introductions to some of his stories, he seemed to like someone who understood the human cost of war from first-hand experience. He took a break from writing at the start of his career to see action in Vietnam and he was candid about how this experience had given him PTSD and how he’d cope with it for decades. We lost a good man with David Drake, that much is certain.

Of course, Drake didn’t just write military SF—far from it. He at least dabbled in nearly everything, and if anything he seemed to think of himself as a horror writer first and foremost, despite that not being what he’s most known for. “The Automatic Rifleman” is a creepy yarn, although less haunted-house horror and more a look into man’s capacity for evil. Because it’s never been anthologized I had basically no clue what it even was going in, but in hindsight I should’ve taken the title (it’s a reference) as a clue. It’s also SF, although how it’s SF is not revealed to us until the very end. I won’t bury the lead here, so I’ll say now I liked this one quite a bit more than “Time Safari,” although as we’ll see, and as Drake will admit freely, he did take some notes from one of the masters of the field.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies, which is on the Archive. It’s never been anthologized, but has been reprinted in a few Drake collections, incidentally all being his horror-themed collections. There’s From the Heart of Darkness, Balefires, and then Night & Demons, which from what I can tell is just Balefires but bigger. The latter two (not sure about the first) come with lengthy introductions by Drake for each story. A few stories from these collections are available to read on Baen’s site free of charge, although “The Automatic Rifleman” is not one of them.

Enhancing Image

A trio, Kerr, Davidson, and Penske, arrive at a secluded apartment for a certain man they’re supposed to need for a certain job. Kerr is an idealist, Davidson is a bitch, and Penske is a pessimist. The other party, Coster, is a strange man with an even stranger-looking rifle that’s supposed to be his weapon of choice; their mutual contact didn’t say much about him, but he’s apparently a gifted marksman. The job is simple: assassination. The target is the prime minister of Japan, who is touring the US for the sake of business. (Incidentally this story anticipates the racist tendency in some ’80s SF to depict Japan as a threat to American economic and technological supremacy.) Kerr, the brains behind the operation, has rather vague politics but seems to fall somewhere on the left; certainly his disdain for environmental destriction in the name of business has an anti-capitalist bent. (I think Drake makes a bit too much of a point that Kerr is an “affluent” black American, with a suit and everything.) Whether or not Coster agrees with Kerr’s views doesn’t matter: he’s getting paid to do a job.

On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald took position in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, as John F. Kennedy was passing through as part of a motorcade. Oswald fired three shots with a bolt-action rifle, wounding the governor of Texas and killing Kennedy, scoring a shot through the throat plus a headshot. He was a former Marine.

Something sneaky “The Automatic Rifleman” does is that it makes you unsure if anything even fantastical is gonna happen, because for a long while it holds its cards close to its chest and plays out like a realistic crime thriller. There is, however, a creeping sense that something beyond normal human experience might be at work. Penske is the weapons expert of the trio, set to be the second gunman in the assassination in case Coster fumbles, and he can’t figure out what kind of gun Coster’s is supposed to be; it looks like a modified M14 carbine but Penske can’t be sure and Coster’s not telling. At one point he asks Coster how he got the rifle and Coster replies with, “You’d better hope you never learn.” We never do learn exactly how Coster got his rifle, but we can infer he didn’t buy it at a gun store. Certainly Coster doesn’t treat his rifle like how a normal person (with training) would handle a firearm; he basically always has it with him, even when he goes to bed. It could just be that Coster has a screw loose: he does, after all, claim to have killed both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, with this rifle, and he’s implied to be some kind of racist. He makes the trio uneasy, but he’s also an unnaturally good sharpshooter.

On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother before taking a sniper rifer to the clock tower of the University of Texas at Austin, killing three people in the campus’s main building before killing another eleven from the clock tower. He kept shooting for an hour and a half before authorities killed him. He was a former Marine.

Penske is the one in the trio who doubts Coster’s skills, so they travel to a farm owned by a contact of theirs that would serve as a firing range. Coster proves to be as good a shot as he claims to be, but he also acts rather strangely around firearms—like he’s not used to being around them, despite never being without his rifle. Afterwards Penske even claims he saw Coster close his eyes shut while firing his rifle, as if jarred by the very use of his weapon. He can’t put his finger on how this is possible, but Penske supposes Coster is not a veteran, or has military training at all, yet is able to hit bottles with pin-point accuracy, even with his eyes closed. It’s like handling the rifle gives him the ability to shoot like a pro, like how the whimpiest person on the planet can be made threatening with a good guard dog. “Or a witch cat,” Penske says rather pointedly. He’s scarily close to being right. Coster is sort of like a foil to Penske, in that they’re both pessimists who think themselves good at what they do, namely killing; yet while Penske is an imperfect but skilled shooter, there is something seriously wrong with Coster. He has a strange philosophy about the nature of man, that man of some kind of werebeast, “part flesh, part metal,” conjoined with his technology.

On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King in the face with a hunting rifle while the latter stood on the balcony of his motel room. King died about an hour later. Ray was a convicted criminal and was already on the run from authorities when he crossed paths with King in Memphis. He had military training but was apparently a poor soldier, and several sources, including King’s family, doubt he was the shooter.

Have I mentioned this story is dark? Its eeriness has only increased with time, which is partly why I think it’s due to be included in some themed anthology in the future. It’s a story whose potency only heightens as American life becomes more submerged in everyday violence. Assassinations, lynchings, police brutality, white supremacists ramming their cars into crowds of protesters, people bringing guns into schools. We know that, regardless of individual or systemic problems, these are the result of human malice, and Drake knows this too. In his introduction he says “The Automatic Rifleman” is horror, but also escapist, because it posits that man’s evils are not the result of man’s own doing. “The story posits the notion that things are in their present state because some external force is working to make them bad; in other words, the world’s problems are not the result of mankind’s own actions.” It actually reminds me of the movie Sorcerer, and how director William Friedkin said he picked that title because he wanted to evoke the sense that the horrors of human existence are the machinations of some unseen force. The sorcerer is purely metaphorical, and in the case of Friedkin’s movie the sorcerer is capitalism; but the external evil lurking in Drake’s story turns out to be a lot more tangible.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s the day of the assassination, and Penske and Coster have set up camp while the prime minister is making his way through a parade. The “good” news is Coster’s aim is true, and within seconds the prime minister lies dead or dying, “his spine shattered by two bullets,” while security people surround him in vain. (Reminder that this was published about six months before the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.) The bad news, for our Anti-Heroess™ at least, is that in trying to escape the scene (they were on a high-level floor), Coster takes a serious fall and is unable to get up; and Penske knows carrying Coster would likely result in both of them getting caught. Coster, in self-defence, takes aim at Penske when it becomes clear what’s about to be done, but his rifle refuses to fire—the safety refuses to turn off. We don’t see it, but it’s implied Penske knifes Coster to death, and we can infer this because afterwards he now has the rifle. Have I mentioned this story takes a bleak view of humanity? I hope you didn’t go into this expecting to sympathize with any of the characters. I know Drake said it’s meant to be escapist, but I keep thinking of real-world horrors while reading it. Can’t tell if this counts as good or bad writing.

On July 8, 2022, Tetsuya Yamagami shot former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the chest with a double-barreled shotgun the former had constructed in the comfort of his own home. Abe died five hours later. Yamagami had military training, and a series of family tragedies plus Abe’s cult connections drove him to plot Abe’s murder.

You may be wondering just what is SFnal about this story, and if you’ve been paying attention you probably guessed: the rifle is alive. Specifically the rifle is an alien, descended from “metal creatures who glittered and shifted their forms and raised triumphant cities to the skies.” The rifle is basically a parasite that communicates telepathically with its host, like Sauron’s ring, and Penske has taken Coster’s place as the new Gollum. We learn all this in the last few paragraphs of the story, and for my money I think Drake could’ve done a slightly more convincing job had he opted for fantasy and made the rifle a supernatural thing; but then there weren’t many outlets for short fantasy in 1980. Science fiction it is, then! Drake freely admits to have taken inspiration from Fritz Leiber’s “The Automatic Pistol,” which honestly is a connection I should’ve made from the start given I had read that story. I think I prefer Drake’s rendition, granted that “The Automatic Pistol” was a very early Leiber story and that later Leiber would write more gracefully than Drake. You could call it a sort of remake, but I like to think of it more as a variation on a theme. Leiber wrote his story seemingly in reaction to Chicago gang violence in the ’20s and ’30s while Drake was reacting to shootings and assassinations in the ’60s.

A Step Farther Out

A good story can be similar to an older story, by design, and get away with it if it adds something new to the equation, which I think this does. There’s the Leiber influence, with perhaps some Sturgeon (specifically “Killdozer!”) in there as well, but it’s still very much David Drake’s story. The SFnal element is a little arbitrary, in that it could have just easily been explained in supernatural terms, but as a machine fable in the mode of Kipling it’s still effective. This all raises a question, though: If “The Automatic Rifleman” was a then-modernized riff on “The Automatic Pistol,” then what story would take the same basic premise and apply it to the current era? And has such a story already been written?

See you next time.