Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Short Story Review: “The Keys to December” by Roger Zelazny

December 10th, 2023

(Cover by Keith Roberts. New Worlds, August 1966.)

Who Goes There?

It’s possible that a TV adaptation of his Amber series will bring about a renaissance, but for many years now Roger Zelazny has been a somewhat known but sadly not famous science-fantasy writer. He had one of the fastest rises to prominence of any genre SF writer, making his professional debut in 1962 and just a few years later he would win big at the inaugural Nebulas. (He probably would’ve also won two Hugos that same year had the Best Novelette category been in effect then, as “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” would’ve surely won that, on top of the Nebula.) In the ’60s Zelazny was a critical darling, and the ’70s saw commercial success with his Amber novels. Despite some more award wins, though, critical opinion grew shaky on him after his ’60s explosion, not helped by the fact that his output slowed down in the last years of his life.

Zelazny died relatively young, in 1995 from cancer. That he didn’t live to see what is probably the biggest indicator of his legacy, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Martin very consciously takes after Zelazny, more on that later), no doubt played a part in dooming him to semi-obscurity. Despite being repped by some big names currently in the field like Martin and Neil Gaiman, recovering Zelazny is still a work in progress, completion date unknown. “The Keys to December” is one of those short stories Zelazny wrote in a white heat that made his reputation, and with good reason, as the SFWA, in agreeing with my assessment, nominated it for a Nebula. Just one of many for Zelazny during that time!

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1966 issue of New Worlds, which for some reason is not on the Archive but which thankfully is on Luminist. Its quality was immediately noted because the very next year it appeared in Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds (ed. Michael Moorcock) and World’s Best Science Fiction: 1967 (ed. Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim). It then appeared in The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and in the more comprehensive The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Volume 2.

Enhancing Image

Jarry Dark is your typical hard-working blue-collar man, except for the fact that a) he has a keen business sense, and b) he’s not, strictly speaking, human. Jarry was born to normal human parents, but his parents had signed away his future job prospects and even his genes to General Mining. The idea is that Jarry is to be genetically modified in utero as a Catform, or a humanoid with catlike qualities like those ears and a coat of thick hair—plus what will turn out to be a tendency to purr. The bad news of course is that Jarry and his kind will not be able to interact so much with normal human society, being different but also built for much colder climates than normal humans could withstand; but the good news is that by signing this contract his parents have guaranteed him a job with General Mining. Jarry will be trained to work on Alyonal, a recently purchased would-be mining colony.

The problem then becomes this: What if suddenly there is no more Alyonal? That planet’s sun has gone nova and now Jarry and his fellows (those of “the December Club”) are left without a workplace. There’s an initial hurdle to jump over with regards to this story, which is the absurd notion that a company with surely massive resources can genetically modify a race of furries into existence but can’t anticipate a sun going nova. A common flaw in Zelazny’s writing is that he’s not keen on scientific plausibility, and actually there’s a good chance he’ll deliberately go for an outdated depiction of a planet or ecosystem. The Mars of “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” was not a realistic depiction of that planet, even in 1963. The Venus of “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” has more in common with how Leigh Brackett wrote it in the ’40s than with any speculations on that planet in 1965. “The Keys to December” has the advantage of depicting fictional planets, including what will be the setting for the action, dubbed Alyonal II, but we’ll come back to implausibility in a second.

So the Catforms are out of a job. Except not really. For one, true to the contract, the Catforms are guaranteed employment “until [they] achieved [their] majority” from General Mining, and Jarry himself soon enough becomes independently wealthy through the stock market. Now, finding a planet that can support life, Catform life specifically, and which is in rich in minerals, is a tall order. And then there’s the cost of terraforming, which will be necessary. “Worldchange” units cost a lot of money and a lot of manpower will be needed. Ultimately you have the December Club, some 28,000 Catforms, moving to Alyonal II with twenty Worldchange units, in a terraforming effort that Jarry calculates will take 3,000 years. This, of course, is 3,000 years in objective time; the workers will take shifts between working and cold sleep, and it’s said in passing at one point that due to advancements in medicine (read: space wizard handwaving), people can live unnaturally long lives in this future. Jarry and his “betrothed” Sanza will age only several years themselves while they pass over centuries.

Another problem: Alyonal II can not only support life but is in fact already teeming with it. Life itself is not unusual on this planet: you have the usual plant life, plus birds and assorted mammals. Not that Zelazny is normally creative with inventing alien life, but here he may be trying to make a point about Alyonal II being a counterpart to Earth. This idea gets reinforced when the settlers meet a vaguely humanoid race they take to calling Redforms, who at the outset are a little less evolved than our distant ancestors. “It was covered with a reddish down, had dark eyes and a long, wide nose, lacked a true forehead. It had four brief digits, clawed, upon each hand and foot.” An apt comparison might be that the Catforms are like homo sapiens while the Redforms are like Neanderthals, except it’s a sort of ironic reversal since the Catforms are the ones built for cold weather while Neanderthals died out (partly) because they could not adapt to warmer climate. You probably already guessed what the central conflict will be: the fact that as the Catforms terraform the planet, whole species will inevitably die out, including the Redforms who are at least borderline sentient.

“The Keys to December” explores the inherent tragedy of colonialism, but also overspecialization. We would blame the Catforms more for their lack of consideration for the native life, but the Catforms can’t live anywhere else except maybe in the vacuum of space; these are beings who were created for a rather niche existence. It’s a question of adaptation. Most of the life on the planet simply will not be able to adapt to the changing climate in 3,000 years—probably not even 10,000 years. This is the cold reality of man-made climate change. Homo sapiens can adapt to basically anything, as history has shown time and again, but the same can’t be said for most anything else. I’m not sure if Zelazny was making a comment on man-made climate change, since when he wrote this story (circa 1965), this was a topic that would not make its way into popular discussion for several more years. Then again, while they do tend to be comically wrong about predicting the future, SF writers are, or at least should be, less vulnerable to future shock. Regardless, intended or not, it still rings true.

Speaking of intentions, it’s hard to say who or what inspired Zelazny. All artists are inspired by something; I’ve yet to see any exceptions to this. The thing is that aside from maybe Ray Bradbury I can’t think of a clear predecessor to Zelazny in American genre SF. With “The Keys to December,” though, I was less reminded of Bradbury and more of Poul Anderson and Cordwainer Smith, who are not authors I would immediately associate with Zelazny. Admittedly with Smith the comparison is more surface level—ya know, genetically modified furries to be used for blue-collar work. But this story almost reads like an homage to Anderson’s more humane works and I have to wonder if this is a coincidence. For one there’s the preoccupation with planet-building, which I have to admit is a premise that never fails to draw my interest. (Why else would I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, and then stall on that series when Green Mars turned to be such a slog?) But there’s also a thematic similarity, in that Anderson often posits that interfering with other people’s cultures is a bad idea; this is a notion Zelazny, at least in this story, agrees with.

Of course, Zelazny is a more graceful writer than any of the aforementioned people, yes even including Bradbury. Enough happens in “The Keys to December” that it could serve as the germ for a whole novel, but Zelazny not only keeps it as novelette length but uses its relative brevity to achieve a poetic effect. The alternating sleep-wake cycle attains its own rhythm and we start to see the planet change in fits and starts alongside the characters, like camera footage being played at double speed in random intervals. Zelazny oscillates between long borderline Faulknerian passages and these short, punchy, at times vulgar bits that imply someone who probably smoked weed in college but also first tried his hand at writing poetry before he realized he was more suited to prose. Sometimes this is done for comedic effect; in the case of “The Keys to December” it’s done to convey a crushing sense of loss. Even as the Catforms slowly mold the planet to be more to their liking, a price must be paid. Take this, for example:

It was twelve and a half hundred years.

Now they could breathe without respirators, for a short time.

Now they could bear the temperature, for a short time.

Now all the green birds were dead.

While it’s hard to figure out who came before Zelazny (he really was one of those bright new talents in the ’60s, alongside Samuel R. Delany, and even Delany had obvious ties to the Modernists), it’s much easier to see who took after him. I’ve read a fair bit of early George R. R. Martin, his ’70s material, when he was trying to make his name more as a science fiction writer, and early Martin often reads much like early Zelazny, although Martin never had the knack for poetry that Zelazny did. Much as I love Martin’s “With Morning Comes Mistfall” (review here), it has some of the hallmarks of early Zelazny: a mood piece with a poetic rhythm set on an alien planet of dubious scientific plausibility. This is not really a slight against Martin; there are far worse writers to copy than Zelazny, especially early Zelazny when he seemed to be at his most passionate. True enough there’s a bit of romance here, although Sanza is not exactly a three-dimensional character; not that she needs to be, since ultimately the tragedy of the situation is far grander in scope than something between two people.

There Be Spoilers Here

Centuries have passed, and things have been going smoothly for Jarry and Sanza at their installation—until tragedy strikes. They encounter a bear-like creature while going out for a ride on their “sled,” and in the ensuing fight Sanza and the “bear” kill each other, and in front of a group of Redforms no less. Sanza is the first Catform to die during the terraforming. Centuries pass again. Something very strange starts happening with the Redforms: for one they’ve begun to evolve physically, even growing a pair of thumbs (I doubt this can be achived in a thousand years or so), but they’ve also taken to seeing the Catforms as demigods. Jarry is understandably disquieted by how the Redforms have taken on a more human appearance and demeanor. “They now had foreheads.” They’ve been adapting to the changing environment, but it might not be enough; they will almost certainly die out once the planet becomes cold enough for the Catforms’ liking.

Is this genocide? Is it genocide to kill off a race of sentient beings by way of inaction? Is it fair that one race must die so another can live? The best Jarry can hope for is that he can convince the rest of the December Club to slow down the terraforming enough that the Redforms might stand a fighting chance. Maybe it’s from a combination of grief and guilt, the former from losing Sanza and the latter from seeing life vanish on the planrt, that pushes Jarry to drastic measures—to terrorism. He sabostages multiple installations before they catch him. It’s amazing they don’t opt to shoot him on sight, but remember that Jarry partly bankrolled the project in the first place and is a highly respected member of the Club, plus the fact that grief does strange things to a person’s brain. And his conscience. A lethal cocktail of grief and guilt can send someone into a downward spiral mentally. Zelazny’s early stuff can be emotionally intense at times, but “The Keys to December” might be the most emotionally effective short story of his I’ve read, partly because it has a rock-solid foundation (iffy science aside) and partly because this is Zelazny at his most sincere.

Jarry forces a vote from the Club, even those who were supposed to be in cold sleep, as to what to do with the Redforms, and it’s unclear if the Club votes to slow down terraforming or not. Even so, the ending is deeply bittersweet. Jarry opts to forego cold sleep and spends the rest of his days with the Redforms, the race he had helped doom to extinction. But he did what he could, and that has to be worth something. The hero suffering a case of conscience like this is a bit unusual for Zelazny, whose characters tend to be more unrepentantly hard-boiled, and even Anderson (again the closest point of comparison for this story specifically) usually doesn’t bless (or curse) his characters with conscience like this. “The Keys to December” is in some ways atypical Zelazny; if not for its stylistic tics I would almost not think he had written it. This is not a bad thing. Zelazny wrote a lot in the ’60s and he did sometimes repeat himself, but not here.

A Step Farther Out

When recommending old-timey genre SF writers to people there’s sometimes the temptation to add the asterisk of a given writer’s prose style being function-only. This is not a problem with Zelazny, because line for line he was such a wordsmith, something I remembered when reading this story. Zelazny has other problems, such as an indifference to scientific plausibility, which does rear its head a bit here, but it’s easy to forgive. Some of Zelazny’s stuff can read as workmanlike (by his standards) and a little too abstract (the number of mood pieces he wrote, lacking both plot and character), but “The Keys to December” is a great SF story in the classic sense, in that it’s a human story whose conflict and resolution would not be possible without its science-fictional aspect. It’s a mix of scientific intrigue and human tragedy that Poul Anderson could muster on a very good day but which Zelazny, at least in the ’60s, evoked like it was second nature.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson (Part 1/2)

December 6th, 2023

(Cover by Jack Coggins. F&SF, September 1953.)

Who Goes There?

With a career spanning over half a century, and with his productivity almost always insanely high, tracking Poul Anderson’s career is sort of like tracking American genre SF in the latter half of the 20th century. Anderson could repeat himself, and not everything he wrote was good, but he was a remarkably versatile writer, being one of the few American writers of the mid-20th century to be about as comfortable writing both science fiction and fantasy, although he wrote sadly too little of the latter. His novels Brain Wave and The Broken Sword were published the same year and you’d probably not think they were written by the same hand. His popularity has waned since his death, as happens with most writers, partly I suspect because publishers (Baen Books and Open Road Media being the main culprits) do not give his best work the treatment they deserve. You’re unlikely to find Anderson in the wild outside of used bookshops.

Aside from The Broken Sword Anderson’s most well-known fantasy is Three Hearts and Three Lions, which was published as a book in 1961 but which ran first as a short serial in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas explicitly wanted to forego serials for F&SF, but as they explain in the introductory blurb for this serial, they could not fit all of Anderson’s story into one issue—probably more due to problems with scheduling than the raw length of the story. The serial version probably runs about 35,000 words and is thus a novella, hence the magazine version would get a Retro Hugo nomination in that category. The novel version is probably about 50,000 words and, having read both the serial and book versions before, I don’t remember anything revelatory being added. As far as I can tell the serial version has never been reprinted.

Placing Coordinates

It was serialized in the September and October 1953 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The novel version has been printed many times over the years, and currently has ebook and paperback editions from Open Road Media—at least the latter of which I would avoid. Thankfully it’s not hard to find used copies of older editions at reasonable prices, including paperbacks from Baen (hmmm), Ace, and Berkley Medallion.

Enhancing Image

The narrator (who has a name I think but it doesn’t matter) reminisces about a college friend of his who was of a weird sort and to whom a very weird thing had happened. Holger Carlsen is an engineering student and a Dane, with an accent to boot. We’re told that Holger, if not for his foreignness, would be a stereotypical upstanding American boy; he studies hard, doesn’t mess around with girls, and is built like a brick shithouse (he’s an athlete on top of being a good student, how swell). There is one other odd thing about him aside from him being a Dane: he has no clue who his parents are. He had apparently been left on a doorstep in the town of Elsinore, “Hamlet’s old home, you know,” and adopted by the Carlsens. He’s been studying in the US, but once World War II starts and the Nazis occupy Denmark, Holger feels compelled to return to his homeland, foregoing military service and instead joining the Danish resistance movement. That’s right, we have an Antifa hero and we’re only a few pages in, very good start.

An operation goes amiss, however, and one fateful night Holger is trapped on a beach within spitting range of the enemy; but just when he’s about to face certain death he gets taken somewhere else—indeed somewhere completely different from anywhere he could recognize. He’s in clothes he doesn’t remember ever wearing and soon he finds a horse which looks like he had been riding it, with equipment to boot. The most striking of these new items is a shield with three hearts and three lions on it. “The shield was of the conventional heraldic form, about four feet long, and obviously new.” At first glance he thinks he has been transplanted into the past, maybe medieval Britain; certainly he’s no longer in Denmark. His meeting with a strange old woman at her cottage, Mother Gerd, confirms that like Dorothy and her dog he is no longer home. This is clearly not the past of Holger’s Earth because Gerd is able to conjure a demon (to tell Holger what the fuck he ought to do), only the first of many supernatural happenings.

I’m gonna be focusing more on characters and ideas Anderson puts forth since the plot is rather loosey-goosey, and anyway it’s the least interesting (for my money) aspect of the whole thing. Where to start? For one this might be the only time I’ve ever seen in literature (and I’ve read a fair amount) where a character is introduced with an accent, only for them to lose it. This was not done out of carelessness but for a reason I at first couldn’t figure out, and even then Anderson doesn’t explain why Holger loses his accent. The reason might actually be twofold: one is that there are a few characters we’ll meet who have thick accents, and having to deal with a protagonist having an accent on top of that might prove to be too much; and the second is that people talk differently in this new world, opting for pseudo-Elizabethan English. I have my own issues with this. Anderson can be stilted when it comes to dialogue on the best of days, and to his credit he puts more effort here into giving the impression of an alternate medieval world than one would expect from such a young writer, but that also means I sometimes have to reread lines of dialogue.

Speaking of nigh impenetrable accents, we’re soon introduced to Hugi, a jolly and often drunken dwarf who is to serve as Holger’s guide/sidekick in this brave new world. I would probably like Hugi more if not for the fact that his dialogue comes off like trying to read someone’s chicken scratch through beer goggles. And to complete the trifecta of Our Heroes™ we’re met with the obligatory love interest, Alianora, a “swan-may” who can transform between human and swan form at will and is a fetching girl of all of about eighteen years (Holger is ssomewhere in his early 20s so it’s fine). As far as classic high fantasy tropes go we’re ticking off some boxes: we’ve got the muscular hero, the affable dwarf sidekick, the old witch who talks in Expositionese, the boring good girl whom the muscular hero is to win in record time, and so on. Of course these were not tired tropes in 1953, and indeed this was a year before The Lord of the Rings. Robert E. Howard was long dead, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series was sort of in limbo, Weird Tales was about to shut down (not for the last time), and while there were a few fantasy magazines active then, none of them were keen on printing heroic fantasy, which makes the publication of Three Hearts and Three Lions in F&SF all the more remarkable.

If people reading Three Hearts and Three Lions nowadays were to find it vanilla and even a bit preachy (this is an overtly Christian narrative, as I’ll explain), it’s partly because of circumstances outside the story’s control. Take for example the fact that the sides in the battle here is not exactly between good and evil, but Law and Chaos. As far as I can tell this is the first example in fantasy writing of such a dynamic and it’ll sound weirdly familiar to fans of Dungeons & Dragons—indeed even people who do not play TTRPGs. What was a novel concept then is now pretty standard. Take, for instance, this explanation of the battle between Law and Chaos:

Humans, except for occasional witches and such-like, were, consciously or unconsciously, on the side of Law; the Middle World, which seemed to include such realms as Faerie, Trollheim, and the Giants, was with Chaos—was, indeed, a creation thereof. Wars among men, like that now being waged between the Saracens and the Holy Empire, were due to Chaos; under Law, all men would live in peace and order, but this was so alien to the Middle Worlders that they were forever working and scheming to prevent it and to extend their own shadowy dominion.

There is one wrench thrown into all this which will throw off most modern readers, and it’s that those on the side of Law believe in the Abrahamic God. Christianity is placed front and center here, but we’re also told practicing Muslims fight on the side of Law, which is… inclusive? Certainly it’s a bit of a head-scratcher for a secular reader like myself. Anderson’s religion (I’m pretty sure he’s a Christian) doesn’t usually pop up in his writing, and indeed many of his characters are professed non-believers; in that sense he’s pretty open-minded for someone of his time and place, in that he thinks non-believers are just as capable of heroism and introspection as their Christian brethren—a mindset I find to be too rare still. Holger himself says he’s an agnostic, which turns out to matter as he does not exactly start off on the side of Law… but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Another thing that modern readers and fans of anime (the weeaboo scum) will find familiar is the idea of normal Earth person getting spirited away to a secondary fantasy realm. In the wretched and uncultured anime world we call this plot an “isekai,” meaning “another world.” This was actually not a new idea even when Anderson was writing it, but had gone out of fashion by the time of Three Hearts and Three Lions, having not seen serious use since the days of Unknown. Speaking of which, Anderson very deliberately wrote his story such that it could’ve been printed in Unknown had it survived into the ’50s, and more specifically he seems to be taking after L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Harold Shea stories. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. What’s impressive about Anderson’s story is that he is trying to combine “rationalist” fantasy (like the Harold Shea stories) with a Christian-inflected heroic fantasy narrative. Boucher and McComas call this story “science-fantasy” in their introduction, but in my opinion it’s straight fantasy—albeit with a scientist’s need for reasoning. What Anderson is doing here is pretty ambitious: he’s attempting to marry reasoning with faith, two things that most would say are mutually exclusive.

Does Anderson succeed? I would say basically yes, but at the very least it’s a neat experiment, if also tempered (or anchored, depending on how you look at it) by a straightrfoward fantasy adventure plot. We can talk about the scientific basis for the new world Holger finds himself in, or the Christian symbolism of his being caught in the conflict between Law and Chaos, but this is ultimately still about action and a certain “wow” factor. It works because Anderson, for all his faults with writing characters (including some passive misogyny, as for example all the women in this story being either Madonnas, whores, or too decrepit to be desirable), takes great joy in realizing settings and coming up with ways to put these settings to use. This is, after all, still the guy who wrote the hard-as-nails SF thriller We Have Fed Our Sea (aka The Enemy Stars). And despite its God-fearing demeanor and adherence to the rulebook of genre narrative, this is a youthful and spritely tale, full of what we in the biz call a sense of wonder. Anderson would take a more sprawling and melancholy direction with The Broken Sword, but here he has different goals in mind.

There Be Spoilers Here

I’m gonna hold my tongue and wait to discuss this more in my review of the second installment. All I’ll say right now is that if given the choice between Alianora and Morgan le Fey, I would turn evil and choose the latter in an instant, fate of the world be damned. Imagine turning down a bad bitch like that. Not sure why writers always give the villainess more personality than the “good girl” we’re supposed to side with.

A Step Farther Out

Anderson, who mind you would’ve been all of 25 when he wrote Three Hearts and Three Lions, had ambitions for his short novel that were twofold: he wanted to write a heroic fantasy narrative at a time when that subspecies of fantasy writing had gone nigh extinct (at least in the US), and he wanted to write a “rational” fantasy in the Unknown mode. There is, of course, a third goal here, which was to write fantasy inspired by his Danish heritage. He must’ve been in a certain mood circa 1953, because he wrote his two major fantasies—this and The Broken Sword—in close succession, with the latter being decidedly more melancholy. Maybe it was a kind of homesickness. Anderson was born in the US but was the son of Danish immigrants, and he did live in Denmark for a short time in his childhood. Three Hearts and Three Lions is more of a straight power fantasy and given to old-school heroic fantasy tropes than The Broken Sword (although the power fantasy aspect is tempered by the ending, more on that when we get to it), but it’s still a rip-roaring good time with quite a few novel ideas.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Pursuit” by Lester del Rey

December 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Paul Orban. Space SF, May 1952.)

Who Goes There?

Lester del Rey was one of several young writers who came about in the late ’30s, just in time for John W. Campbell to take over Astounding Science Fiction and reshape it to his liking. Along with Theodore Sturgeon, del Rey was a sentimentalist who right away made a reputation for “human” stories, some of which, like “The Faithful,” “Helen O’Loy,” and “The Day Is Done,” were very popular at the time. Del Rey started out as sort of a humanist, but, maybe because he got more accustomed to the cutthroat and low-paying nature of the industry, both the man himself and his fiction became a lot more bitter with time. Eventually he would marry Judy-Lynn del Rey, who proved to be one of the most talented editors of her time, sadly gone too soon. The del Reys’ most lasting impact might be in their founding of Del Rey Books, which persists to this day.

In the early ’50s, apparently to capitalize on a boom in the market, del Rey got to edit several new SFF magazines—all of them unfortunately short-lived. One of these is Space Science Fiction, and to inaugurate this new magazine del Rey decided to employ his favorite writer: himself. “Pursuit” is considerably more hard-boiled than early del Rey, and it’s a curious choice for introducing the magazine even if it’s far from the best.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then collected in Gods and Golems alongside other novellas and long novelettes. If you’re curious you can read it for free on Project Gutenberg, and actually running the Gutenberg text through a word processor convinced me it’s of novella length—about 18,000 words. ISFDB incorrectly lists it as a novelette.

Enhancing Image

Wilbur Hawkes is an assistant math professor and recent divorcee, which normally would make him the protagonist of a Saul Bellow novel if not for the fact that he can’t remember anything from the past seven months. He wakes up one day and finds he’s taken up smoking, a habit he did not have before, and that through circumstantial evidence he finds there’s a seven-month gap in his memory. He remembers granting his ex-wife a divorce and getting a letter from a certain Dr. Meinzer, but after that it’s a blank. Quickly things go amiss when he finds he’s being watched by somebody, who probably knows more than he does, probably G-men who look to take him in for some purpose. Or it could be one big misunderstanding. Much of the ensuing plot is Hawkes a) recovering what had happened during those seven months, and b) trying to evade men who perhaps wanna do him harm. Weird things start happening. A subway entrance collapses. A cat, miraculously and horrifying, gets turned inside out. Something either supernatural or super-scientific is going on, Hawkes is gonna find out.

I don’t have a lot to say with this one, for a couple reasons. It’s a short novella, true, and fast-paced, but it’s also a victim of its own sense of economy. Del Rey runs into a major storytelling problem here, which is the “and then” school of plotting. Much of “Pursuit” can be summed up as “And then Hawkes went to this place, and then this happened, and then this happened” a few times over until we slow down a bit. There is no B-plot so it’s a straight line from Hawkes’s apartment to when he meets Ellen, at which point the chase slows down and we’re allowed some backstory, if not enough to stop the chase from continuing. Ellen is a childhood friend of Hawkes’s, although the two have not met in many years—at least from Hawkes’s perspective. Ellen, for her part, knows a lot more than she lets on at first. The two clearly have chemistry and they hit it off in what would normally be hasty circumstances, but these would not be so hasty for Ellen. I have issues with the characters, or rather the lack of characters, but to give del Rey some credit his inserting of a romance plot could be less convincing.

“Pursuit” is not very good, but it does have a few points of interest. For one there’s a barely offscreen sex scene between people who are not married that I was surprised to read; must’ve been rather titillating for what would’ve been a puritanical SF readership. Indeed there’s a level of violence and sexuality prevalent here that would’ve kept this story out of the pages of Astounding, not to mention a persistent (if also rudimentary at best) harking to Freudian psychology. The unconscious keeps being called “unconsciousness,” and it’s a good thing del Rey’s been dead for thirty years or else I would kill him over that. The central conflict of “Pursuit” is between Hawkes’s conscious and unconscious mind, but the way it’s phrased makes it sounds like he’s fighting between being awake and being asleep. Anyway, it’s too racy for Astounding but also too unrefined for Galaxy, which I suppose means it’s a good thing the magazine market was oversaturated in the early ’50s. Del Rey seemed to be playing with the boundary between SF and detective fiction here, something he would apparently try again in Police Your Planet.

There Be Spoilers Here

The big twist of “Pursuit” is one I saw coming a mile away, which is that Hawkes had, prior to the story’s beginning, agreed to an experiment with psi powers and in the process became a kind of superman; all of the crazy shit that happens in the story is his own doing, or rather the doing of his unconscious mind. Hawkes is so powerful in fact that the men pursuing him are no serious threat to him, and even when he tries to kill himself (for what he thinks is the good of everyone) he physically can’t. It’s at the point where Hawkes realizes he’s stuck with his psi powers and that the cat’s out of the bag, so to speak, that del Rey makes it clear he’s not really talking about psi powers—he’s talking about nuclear weapons. I wonder if readers were already sick of nuclear allegories by 1952. Also, del Rey runs into the problem of how one would inject a story with conflict if it’s about a superman; there are several ways one can tackle this issue. A. E. van Vogt basically made a career out of justifying plots around characters who are nigh invincible, most famously in Slan where the solution was to make the superman a child in a world where there are adults, both normal and super, who wanna eat him for lunch. In the case of “Pursuit” del Rey “solves” the issue by giving his superman a case of amnesia. Success…?

A Step Farther Out

I was unsure at first if I would have a review out on time today, partly because of outside circumstances but also I have to admit I was dragging my feet on this one. Sure, it’s short and it goes by quickly, but I found so little to chew on. Those who read “Pursuit” might be reminded of early van Vogt, or even Philip K. Dick’s “Paycheck,” but this story is not up to the standard of either good van Vogt or good Dick for a multitude of reasons, not the least of these being its lack of human character. It’s almost a pure action narrative wherein the stakes turn out to be miniscule, even if del Rey tries to make a point at the end. That “Pursuit” probably wouldn’t have gotten published in a magazine del Rey wasn’t editing goes to show that as a writer your worst choice for an editor is yourself.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: December 2023

December 1st, 2023
(Cover by Michael Carroll. Asimov’s, December 2007.)

Christmas is coming up, and my birthday before that. Not incidentally we have a birthday among the authors covered, namely Connie Willis, whose birthday is the 31st. Willis is also very fond of Christmas stories so there’s that. Last December we did a month-long tribute to Fritz Leiber, who sadly will not be featured this time. (Don’t feel too bad, he’s already one of our most frequent “visitors.”) Since we’re closing out the first full year of this site, I figure it’s time to introduce one more major change (not permanent, don’t worry), not for this month but for January. December will be the last month probably until 2025 that I’ll be doing serial reviews; for 2024 I’ll be taking a break from serials and focusing on short stories and novellas, although I’ll still squeeze a few complete novels into the schedule.

The way it’ll work is, the days I would be reviewing sserial installments will instead be relegated to short stories, but otherwise the alternating slot method will not change, only starting in January you can expect to see two short stories for every novella. The space given to complete novels will remain the same: if a novella slot were to fall on the 31st of the month then I’ll at least try to tackle a complete novel. Why no serials for a year? For a few reasons. For one, I’m tired, and also I’ve come to find that my serial reviews are the least popular of my reviews, or rather they get the least feedback. Also, I’m a devotee of the short story at heart, and the reality is that there are way more short stories in the magazine market than serials, by at least a factor of ten; so for one year I think short stories deserve more of the glory. We do, of course, get two short serials to tackle before the hiatus, both of which are actually rereads for me.

There is one other thing I have in mind, a rather special thing, but you’ll have to wait until January to hear about it. It’s a secret. :3

For the serial:
1. Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson. Serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September to October 1953. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. This is the first serial I’ll be covering where I’ve not only read the book version but also the serial version, so this is sort of my third go-around with it. It’s worth it, though; this is one of the more influential works in the history of American fantasy, having partly inspired Dungeons & Dragons. It also makes me wish Anderson wrote more fantasy.
2. Beyond the Black River by Robert E. Howard. Serialized in Weird Tales, May to June 1935. Despite committing suicide at the age of thirty, Howard wrote a truly staggering amount of fiction and created several series in the process, with his most famous creation being Conan the Cimmerian. Howard did not invent sword-and-sorcery fantasy but he had unquestionably the most influence on proceeding American fantasists. This right here was one of the first Conan stories I had read, and it still reads as one of the more unusual.
For the novellas:
1. “Pursuit” by Lester del Rey. From the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction. Del Rey started out as a sentimentalist at a time when genre SF was markedly unsentimental, filling a niche that had gone untapped such that early stories like “Helen O’Loy” and “The Day Is Done” were very popular. He would move away from that style, and in the ’50s he even edited several (very short-lived) SFF magazines, Space Science Fiction being one. Thus the first story in the first issue of this magazine is by del Rey’s favorite writer: himself.
2. “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis. From the December 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo winner for Best Novella. In the ’90s and 2000s Connie Willis could lay claim to being the most popular writer to appear regularly in Asimov’s, and that’s on top of her novels, a few of which are certified classics. Her novel Doomsday Book especially is excellent, although it does not indicate her penchant for humor. She holds the record for most Hugo wins for Best Novella, with “All Seated on the Ground” being her fourth.
For the short stories:
1. “The Keys to December” by Roger Zelazny. From the August 1966 issue of New Worlds. Zelazny looks like he might see a much deserved renaissance soon, with a TV adaptation of his Amber serie being in the works. This is good news, because for a couple decades Zelazny has been threatened with the dark cloud of obscurity, despite being one of the most acclaimed SFF writers to come out of the ’60s. I picked “The Keys to December” because, well, look at the title.
2. “Genesis” by H. Beam Piper. From the September 1951 issue of Future Science Fiction. Piper is surely one of the most tragic figures in old-timey SF, having started his writing career very late (he was in his forties) and committing suicide at the age of sixty, believing himself to be a failure, such that despite not dying young his career was short-lived. It’s a shame, because Piper was in some ways an unusual writer for the time; he was a bit of a character, one could say.
For the complete novel:
1. Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. From the December 1939 issue of Unknown. From 1937 to 1942 (he took a break to support the war effort), de Camp was one of the designated court jesters in John W. Campbell’s Astounding, and perhaps more importantly in Unknown. It was here that de Camp got to show off his range as a fantasist (most famously in his collaborations with Fletcher Pratt), although ironically his two longest solo efforts in Unknown in its first year, Divide and Rule and Lest Darkness Fall, are science fiction, not fantasy. Lest Darkness Fall was de Camp’s solo debut novel, an early example of a modern person being sent back to an ancient time period, and according to a lot of people it’s also his best. It was expanded (although I can’t imagine by much, since the magazine version looks to be a solid 50,000 words) for book publication in 1941.
You may think it a weak move for me to have my last two serial reviews before the hiatus be of ones I’ve already read, but as I’ve said before and always hope to make clear, rereading is arguably more important than reading in the first place. So it goes.

Won’t you read with me?
Serial Review: Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold (Part 4/4)

November 28th, 2023

(Cover by Vincent Di Fate. Analog, February 1988.)

The Story So Far

The Cay Habitat was constructed a few decades ago to house a race of special humans—ones that were made to work in zero gravity indefinitely, since such conditions are awkward for normal humans. With a second set of arms for legs, the quaddies are considered the property of GalacTech, who’re also the employers of Leo Graf, Our Hero™. Leo has a problem: How do you teach a group of people about exploitation when said people exist as slave labor? It’s a question that for better or worse will have to go unanswered, because word gets through that an anti-gravity device has not only been invented but deemed ready for market sale, thus rendering the quaddies obsolete. Of course this raises another problem: What do you do with outdated tech when the tech is people? At best GalacTech will have the quaddies sterilized and shipped off to a barracks—at worst have them terminated with extreme prejudice. If the quaddies can’t be allowed to live out their lives peacefully under GalacTech jurisdiction then the only solution is to get out of said jurisdiction—and then comes an idea.

The Habitat is small, when taken in its essentials; it was made to house a thousand quaddies and little more than that. If broken down, the Habitat could be made to piggyback on an interstellar ship as flies through the wormhole near Rodeo. What at first sounds like a moral problem then becomes an engineering problem. The quaddies are very young (the oldest are barely out of their teens), but the best of them, along with some help from sympathetic humans, could make the scheme a success. Sure, the other end of the wormhole falls under a different planet’s jurisdication, but they’ll cross that bridge when they get there.

Enhancing Image

Sorry this is a day late. Forces beyond my control kept me in a bind yesterday such that I couldn’t write this post in time. Oh well.

I’m not sure if I would get this same feeling if I read it all at once, but I’ve become less interested in Falling Free with each successive installment, and the big reason for this is that Bujold gives us a memorable premise and a memorable setting to go with it, but there also has to be a plot here. For the record, there’s a difference between conflict and plot; you could have a character-driven narrative that’s rife with conflict, but very little actually happens. We start with both external and internal conflict here. We have the conflict between Leo and Van Atta, Leo and Dr. Yei, Dr. Yei and the quaddies, Leo and the quaddies, and of course Leo conflicting with his own interests. A great deal is implied about what had led to the quaddies being created. We only learn about Dr. Cay through second-hand sources, since Cay died a year before the story’s beginning, but what we do learn about him is not flattering. Yei, Cay’s successor, is implied to be in conflict with herself, since she was hired basically to make the quaddies docile whilst being well aware of their slave status, but for most of the novel she has a “just doing my job” mentality that eventually gives way to guilt.

Bujold introduces us to some engrossing character conflicts, but they start taking a backseat as the plot starts being funneled into what amounts to a race against the clock. Van Atta was never a layered character (he is, I have to say, disappointingly one-dimensional), but his role gets eroded to the point where he becomes a walking plot device—a threat that Our Heroes™ have to evade, since he can’t be reasoned with. Since we’re never allowed into Dr. Yei’s head our ability to perceive her inner conflict is limited, and her redemption at the end in incapacitating Van Atta long enough to let the Habitat enter the wormhole is boiled down to a single action. The recurring problem with this novel as it progresses is that it starts out as rather chatty, with a lot of room for character depth, but rather than elaborate on that we’re instead forced down a corridor wherein characters, who once were well-defined and intelligent, are boiled down to their actions. Tony, who is the first quaddie we see, all but stops being a character after the first installment; now admittedly part of this is because he gets put on a bus, figuratively speaking, but when we do meet up with him again he is reduced to something Our Heroes™ have to rescue.

What’s frustrating is that, at least going by Theodore Sturgeon’s definition of what makes a good science fiction story, Falling Free is good SF. Paraphrasing Sturgeon here, a good SF story is a human story with a human problem that must be solved in a human way, but which hinges on a scientific aspect. In Falling Free we’re given a premise which (at least with existing technology) can only be made possible in a science-fictional universe; but at the same time sounds logical enough that it could happen. We’re given a problem centered around human rights and this problem is resolved in a human way, albeit with a dose of that old-school hard SF hardheadedness. There comes a point, however, when Bujold’s economy of style turns against her and the novel, which starts out as seemingly open-ended, turns into a series of Things Happening™. I can see what people mean when they say this is minor Bujold, despite the Nebula win. I would be less disappointed if the novel’s opening stretch wasn’t so promising.

Oh, and the romance between Leo and Silver is both unnecessary and unconvincing, never mind that Silver is half Leo’s age.

A Step Farther Out

I’m unsure how to feel about this novel, although having finished it I can say its winning the Nebula is totally baffling. Was there really no better choice that year? C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen won the Hugo that year, and while I haven’t read it I have this hunch it would’ve at least been the more fitting winner; but to make things more baffling Cyteen wasn’t even nominated for the Nebula! What were people on back in the day? It’s shit like this that my borderline zoomer brain struggles to comprehend. I’m also not sure if Bujold wrote Falling Free with serialization in mind or if maybe her agent recommended it, but I don’t think the serial model works great for her. Admittedly there’s a reason serialization has basically become extinct, because a) not many people read magazine anymore, and b) it incentivizes a certain type of writing that puts higher priority on plot than character. Looking at this novel as a whole, I’m mixed. Getting kinda tired of serials.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Angel’s Egg” by Edgar Pangborn

November 24th, 2023

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, June 1951.)

Who Goes There?

Edgar Pangborn is an author I discovered only this year who is quickly looking to become a favorite of mine. Sure, part of that is because Pangborn seems, in some ways, to be a successor to Clifford Simak in his pastoralism and gentle sentimentalism, but there are also some striking differences; I’m pretty sure Simak would not have written Davy, for one. But still, they’re kindred spirits in that they were, uncharacteristically for genre SF of the time, driven by empathy and a need for peace among men. The atrocities of World War II inspired Simak’s anti-war stance, and the same can probably be said for Pangborn, although with the latter there’s also this palpable fear of nuclear annihiliation—not from the Soviets, but that someone on either side could send humanity into oblivion. Davy, and the other stories set in that universe (a loose series that consumed most of Pangborn’s fiction output after 1960), explores the line humanity must tow, between despair and hope. His 1954 novel A Mirror for Observers similarly asks, in rather Christian allegorical terms, if humanity can be saved.

“Angel’s Egg” was not Pangborn’s first published work of fiction, but it was his SFF debut. For a while I thought this was my first Pangborn short story, but actually I had previously read “The Golden Horn,” which then became part of Davy. Close enough. By the time Pangborn started writing SFF he was already in his forties, and reading “Angel’s Egg” you might get the impression it was written by someone twenty years older and in the twilight of his career; I don’t mean this in a bad way. Pangborn is one of those writers who seemed to be fully formed in his craft right out the gate, and he’s also of a perpetually melancholy sort. He was never that popular, but was and is respected enough by those who’ve read him to have been deserving recipient of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in Invaders of Earth (ed. Groff Conklin), A Century of Science Fiction (ed. Damon Knight), The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (ed. Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg), The Great SF Stories Volume 13, 1951 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and the collection Good Neighbors and Other Strangers. If you wanna read “Angel’s Egg” for free and without having to deal with legal grey areas, you can! It’s on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Starting off with not a criticism of the story per se, but the introductory blurb for this is not one of H. L. Gold’s better pieces of writing. It gives the false impression that we’re in for something comedic, perhaps with a dose of social commentary, which I would say is Robert Sheckley-esque except Sheckley would not debut for another year. There’s a bit of social commentary in “Angel’s Egg,” but it is most certainly not a comedy. I sometimes wonder if authors have any say in the blurbs editors write for their stories in magazines, and I have to assume no because I struggle to believe Pangborn had approved of Gold’s crassness with what is a very tender story.

Anyway, we start with a framing narrative in which we’re informed that David Bannerman, the protagonist, has died. Like with Charles Foster Kane we’re introduced to our main character as he has already exited the world of the living, with the ensuing narrative looking backwards and trying to make sense of the last days of the man’s life. Bannerman is (or was) a middle-aged academic who lives a lonely and uncomplicated existence. He has no close family. He never married. “For the last twelve summers he occupied a small cottage on a back road about twenty-five miles from [the] city, and had few visitors.” The closest he has to human company is Steele, a nearby farmer. An injury obtained during World War I, which as happens sometimes only got worse over the years, prohibits Bannerman from physically strenuous activities. It’s easy to forget this once we get caught up in the narrative, but two things are made apparent at the beginning: a) that Bannerman is a war veteran, and b) that despite having served his country he was apparently accused of being a commie sympathizer during what was, in 1951, the ongoing Red Scare, hence the framing device.

Now, it’s at this point that I feel compelled to bring up the ways in which Pangborn might’ve projected himself onto Bannerman, or rather how there’s a hint of autobiography in the latter. For one, the two were both lifelong bachelors, but their dipositions are also pretty similar. It was brought to my attention through Rich Horton’s review of A Mirror for Observers that Pangborn might’ve been gay, although we don’t have any hard evidence to prove this. At the risk of playing armchair psychologist, I do think it’s very likely that Pangborn was gay, and also that he probably never got to be in a fulfilling romantic relationship. There’s an entrenched loneliness in “Angel’s Egg” and A Mirror for Observers (not to mention the frankly odd way in which relations between men and women are written in Davy) that suggests the queer, although obviously I’m biased on that front. I know I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but bear with me.

One day Camilla, a grumpy old hen on Bannerman’s land, lays a batch of unfertilized eggs—only one of these eggs could not have not have come naturally from the hen, because it does not resemble any egg of any animal Bannerman can think of. “It was a deep blue, transparent, with flecks of inner light that made me think of the first stars in a clear evening.” And there’s something inside. A few days later the egg hatches, and it’s here that we’re introduced to the “angel” of the title, which is of course an alien. The angel resembles a small girl, and is humanoid enough in appearance, except this alien also resembles a bird in that she’s mostly covered in feathers. It’s at this point that the average human would be awe-struck, or even driven to a mental institution, but Bannerman is pretty chill with what turn out to be alien visitors. Why not? It’s not like he has to explain this to anyone. He is one lonely man who lives with his dog Judy, some chickens, and the open air. Never mind Bannerman also considers himself a “naturalist,” and is thus taken to questions of how the angels work.

Worth mentioning is that we never learn what the aliens call themselves; they’re called angels in-story because that’s what Bannerman calls them. No doubt there’s something of the Christian allegory at play here, which must’ve been unusual for what was, even in the early ’50s, a mostly agnostic genre SF readership. Was Pangborn himself a Christian? Maybe. At least by the time he wrote Davy he seemed to take an ambivalent stance on organized religion, and after all one doessn’t have to be Christian to find worth or usefulness in the Christian allegorical mode. I mean Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure but I seriously doubt the guy who wrote Macbeth was a regular churchgoer. This religious undercurrent might’ve also made Gold uncomfortable with the story, despite him obviously being fond of it, and indeed it reads like something that doesn’t wholly fit in with any publication of the time—not even Galaxy, which cast a pretty wide net in the early ’50s. The angels being telepathic (hence they’re being able to communicate with Bannerman and even the animals) made me sigh and also wonder if maybe Pangborn had submitted it to Astounding, but maybe John W. Campbell also didn’t know what to make of it.

Camilla dies. She was already up there in years, but the angel had decided to carry out what one might call assisted suicide. Normally in this situation the alien killing some farm animal would be a harbinger for greater horrors to come, but Bannerman and Pangborn make it very clear that this was not a killing done out of malice or ignorance, but mercy. “She was old. She wanted a flock of chicks, and I couldn’t stay with her. So I—so I saved her life,” says the angel, or rather projects it into Bannerman’s mind. Immediately it sounds strange, to “save” Camilla’s life, because on the surface that’s not what happened. What does the angel mean by “saved,” anyway? Being that the alien is called an angel, we’re obviously supposed to take it as saving someone in the Christian sense—made stranger because this is a chicken we’re talking about, and presumably chickens don’t have souls. There is, however, a second meaning to the word that we’ll discover soon enough. The mystery raised turns out to be not threatening but rather philosophical. The angel and her kin taking up residence on Bannerman’s land could lead to horror or hijinks, but Pangborn doesn’t go with either of those options.

A few things to note before I get into the real conflict of the story, which I’d rather discuss in the spoilers section than here: The angel rapidly maturing, physically, leads to a remark or two from Bannerman that might discomfort the modern reader. Also, the angel is basically a nude human woman but mostly covered in feathers (although her chest is not), which is depicted in a David Stone interior, and this must’ve been pretty racy for readers of the time. Because this is an epistolary narrative we’re stuck in Bannerman’s head except for the framing device, and while I’m not exactly a fan of the epistolary mode (because I’m not terribly interested in reading people’s letters), it makes sense here. Pangborn must’ve considered writing a simple first-person narration, but realized that could not work given the ending, not to mention that the pacing is such that we’re drip-fed information through journal entries. It’s a bit of a long novelette, but except for the very end (which I’ll get to) I think it’s well-paced.

There Be Spoilers Here

Much of the story is concerned with facing death, and in the case of Bannerman it’s being given the choice of either dying naturally or giving up his life for something much greater than himself. Earlier the angel had “saved” Camilla, and later does the same for Judy. Being saved, for the angels, means giving up one’s physical body to have one’s memories pooled into a collective consciousness—like if you were to upload your memories to a computer hard drive. Indeed when reading it I thought that had Pangborn lived and written “Angel’s Egg” some three decades later it could very feasibly be appropriated for a cyberpunk context. The thing is, the angel wasn’t born in the egg; rather the egg is an artificial construct, made to store the angel for a time while it was having its mind pumped with generations—literally millions of years—of information, from not just angels but other walks of life. The angels are benign race, but they were not born that way, nor did they become virtuous overnight. Mistakes were made, and the angels are keenly aware that humans now have the means to destroy themselves—to undo civilization in virtually an instant.

Pangborn asks two questions here that have concerned believers for centuries and theologians especially. Can we, as a species, be saved? And also, What is to become of us after we die? Once the body expires, does the human personality persist? Does our spiritual existence continue after death? To be clear, the “total recall” the angel proposes, of Bannerman allowing his memories to be absorbed into the greater consciousness, is not a way of cheating death. Once Bannerman dies he himself will no longer be conscious, and he will not be aware of how his memories may be used thereafter. Of course the angels will not force Bannerman into this. “Recall cannot begin unless the subject is willing or unresisting; to them, that has to mean willing, for any being with intellect enough to make a considered choice.” Total recall is a process that takes several days, in which the person recalling will lose, gradually, their memories, starting at their earliest and moving up to the present, as which point they’ll die, peacefully. This is not suicide. I’m not sure how each Christian sect treats suicide, but my understanding is that the Roman Catholic Church considers suicide a mortal sin. You could be a serial rapist or ax murderer and still be saved if you jump through the necessary hoops, but if you give in to despair and take your own life then your soul is forfeit. There is, however, a difference between taking one’s own life and giving it up. Bannerman is an educated man and a decent man, and the angels consider it a service to both them and humanity if he were to accept the call and give up his life for them.

Back to the Christian allegory. Bannerman has to make the choice between living out the rest of his life as a normal man and sacrificing himself for the good of mankind, and he chooses the latter. Surely it must’ve occurred to Jesus, maybe during those days when he took off for the desert by himself, that it wasn’t too late to turn back—that he could reject his call to save mankind and live like a normal man. But then what would be the cost? “Angel’s Egg” is a powerful narrative, only slightly dampened by the unnecessary coda at the end so as to close out the framing device, because it’s concerned with questions that don’t necessarily apply to believers. I’m not a believer myself, but I’m still at times preoccupied with man’s spiritual destiny—whether the human race deserves to persist. Bannerman trusting the angels and giving up his life is an act of sheer faith. The moral seriousness of it would’ve been most unusual for the time, and that it’s more than a little sentimental does nothing to detract from the bittersweetness nor the power of Bannerman’s final journal entries.

A Step Farther Out

“Angel’s Egg” reads like the work of a veteran at the height of his powers, and while Pangborn had written fiction before, his sudden appearance in the SFF field with this story must’ve come as a shock for some. Here we have a writer who seemingly came out of the womb fully formed, with a vision that can’t quite be easily categorized, nor can it fall comfortably into any one niche. While the framing device and the angels’ psi powers betray the story’s age, it otherwise holds up strongly as a thoughtful allegory and a tale of first contact. Pangborn’s preoccupation with humanity’s capacity for destruction will rear its head in longer works, but it’s memorably put forth here, for the first time, in a story that’s emblematic of the revolution (a seismic change in literary standards for the field that arguably rivals the New Wave) that was happening in genre SF in the early ’50s. It’s a treasure.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold (Part 3/4)

November 20th, 2023

(Cover by David Hardy. Analog, January 1988.)

The Story So Far

Leo Graf has been assigned to the Cay Habitat, orbiting the planet Rodeo, as a safety instructor, his students being an artificially created race of people known as quaddies—people with four arms and no legs. The first of these quaddies were born out of test tubes a couple decades ago in order to work in deep space permanently, since zero gravity presents a problem for normal humans. Leo has to deal with Bruce Van Atta, consummate asshole, former student, and now his supervisor; Dr. Sondra Yei, a psychologist who has been working to “socialize” the quaddies; and of course the quaddies themselves, the oldest of whom are barely out of their teens. GalacTech, Leo’s employer and the company behind the Cay Project, have no qualms with creating a race of people for slave labor (the quaddies are not considered human) that they can then legally murder if deemed necessary.

Quaddies Tony and Claire conspire with their close friend Silver to leave the Habitat, and it almost works—only a mix-up results in them almost being taken to Rodeo in what would amount to a metal coffin; thankfully they find refuge in a warehouse station orbiting the planet, but unluckily Tony gets injured in an encounter with a security guard. Tony gets taken to a hospital on Rodeo, Claire nearly commits suicide after being separated from her partner, and Silver is traumatized from a drug-addled interrogation led by Van Atta. To make matters worse, Leo hears through the grapevine that an anti-gravity device has not only been patented but is now market-ready, meaning the quaddies are about to become obsolete. What do you do with outdated tech when that tech is people? The only options given are sterilization or outright extermination. The only way the quaddies can get out of this is to escape.

Enhancing Image

My initial concern about Leo becoming metaphorically a white savior for the quaddies has mostly subsided, because it becomes clear quick enough that even with his ingenuity, Leo can’t save the day by himself. Even the assistance of a couple sympathetic humans like (now former) pilot Ti Gulik, much of the work necessary to convert the Habitat into a colony ship must fall into the hands of the quaddies; and why not, they’re supposed to live on it regardless of who’s in charge. Taking apart the Habitat and putting it back together is a bit of a cracked idea, but it’s the best Leo and company can come up with. After all, if they can’t reason with the higher-ups at GalacTech then the next best thing would be to get out of that company’s reach. Space is unbelievably vast, such that no government or company would have infinite reach, and anyway the quaddies were made to live in space indefinitely. Thus Part 3 is largely concerned with cutting off Van Atta and other GalacTech people as Our Heroes™ work out their plan.

I hate to inform you that you’ve just been punk’d, because I’m not really gonna be reviewing Part 3 here. For one I don’t have a lot to say about it, but also I’ve been more weary than usual about reviewing novel serials—not this novel’s fault, it’s pretty good so far, it’s more that I’ve gotten to thinking about the weird nature of serialization and how modern readers basically don’t even know what a serial would look like. I sure as shit didn’t know until just a few years ago, when I started getting into reading scans of old genre magazines. I remember distinctly the first serial I read front to back was Clifford Simak’s Time Quarry, AKA Time and Again, and it was a fundamentally different experience than if I had read the same novel in book form. I would ssay this is something only the most recent generation of SFF readers would know, but even by 1987, when Falling Free began its serial run, serialization in the industry was becoming increasingly old-fashioned. Indeed it was one of the last novels to win a major SFF award to have first appeared in serial form.

There are two major schools of throught with regards to reading a serial: you either read each installment as it comes out or you wait for the serial to finish so you can read all installments in close succession. Now, the way I’ve been reading installments for my reviews does not really fall into either camp, although naturally it falls closer to reading each installment as it comes out, since I take a few days after finishing one to continue to the next. This, of course, is not how you normally read novels; maybe you take a day off when in the middle of one but generally you (and by “you” I mean I) go at it every day, be it 30 or 50 pages at a time. Incidentally an average installment in Analog would run about 40 to 75 book pages, closer to 20 to 50 in Weird Tales. Thing is, taking your time between installments can give the at-times false impression that what you’re reading is longer than it is; you may even experience some fatigue with a novel that, when in book form, is not long at all, especially by modern standards.

Sometimes when tackling a serial I experience such fatigue, and I have to admit that Part 3 of Falling Free was the most recent case. There are a few plausible reasons for this. We’ve now reached the point where the action has picked up and there will be no stopping it, such that character development has been put to the wayside. It’s a bit of an ensemble, but there’s a sizable gap between the characters who matter and those who only exist to push the plot forward. Strange as it is to say, but if anything I wish this novel was longer and that it meandered more; or rather I wish it took more time to ponder the many questions that would arise from its premise. Also, while the love triangle between Leo, Silver, and Ti being a fake-out (the latter two always seeing each other more as friends with benefits) is an amusing subversion of our expectations, I’m less amused by Leo’s crush on Silver. The age gap is an issue, but also we really don’t need romantic tension like that in a narrative where interpersonal drama is already ripe enough. I would probably be feeling less weary if I was reading this as a book, hence what I had said earlier about the differences between the forms.

A Step Farther Out

I can guess as to how this novel will end, but I’m still curious. Again I’m surprised this won the Nebula, because it doesn’t strike me as a novel a fellow writer would like; rather it strikes me as a crowd-pleaser. Then again the SFWA have previously given the Nebula to novels like Rendezvous with Rama that don’t have much merit as pure literature but which function more as adventure fiction of an old-fashioned sort. (I love Rendezvous with Rama, I’m just saying that even for 1973 it must’ve struck people as retrograde.) Similarly there’s almost a pre-New Wave pureness to Falling Free that, except for some sex stuff, could paint it as having been published close to thirty years earlier than it was. What stops it from feeling too old-fashioned is that while Bujold is not a prose poet, she is undoubtedly a humane writer, and that honestly might be more important.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Clash by Night” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

November 17th, 2023

(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, March 1943.)

Who Goes There?

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore each started out as talented writers by themselves, both of them first appearing in Weird Tales and indeed they began as writers of weird fiction. Kuttner was younger, less refined, more cheeky, but also more productive; he employed so many pseudonyms that even Jack Vance was suspected of being a Kuttner pseudonym early in his career. Moore was never that prolific on her own, but what fiction she put out really caught people’s attention, with its poetry, its tonal intensity, and its psychological depth. During World War II, after the two had gotten married, John W. Campbell needed a few authors to fill the pages of Astounding and Unknown while a good portion of his stable went off to support the war effort, and Kuttner and Moore were up to the challenge. From 1942 to 1946, a truly absurd amount of work from the two, both separately and in collaboration, appeared across several magazines, but most notably in Astounding. Naturally, because they wrote more than their own names could carry, they employed new pseudonyms.

“Clash by Night” is one of many stories the two wrote in a white heat, during those war years, this one being first published under Lawrence O’Donnell, which is typically considered a Moore-leaning name. It’s appropriate because “Clash by Night” is a somber, lyrical, rather ponderous novella that stands as a very early example of military SF but which does not fall into what would later be a lot of tropes of the subgenre. It’s imperfect, but it’s conceptually lively and prescient in its own way. Initially a standalone, it would be set in the same universe as the novel Fury, which returns to the misty underwater world of the Keeps—dome-covered colonies on a swampy Venus (not anachronistic in 1943) in the distant future.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (ed. John W. Campbell), The Great SF Stories Volume 5, 1943 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and, as always, Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. It speaks to both the quality and quantity of their output in the ’40s that the Asimov/Greenberg volume contains FIVE stories by Kuttner and/or Moore. I would say that’s a bit much, but they had enough firepower for five writers.

Enhancing Image

The average writer would’ve plopped us right into the action, which would’ve been serviceable enough, certainly nothing inherently wrong with that, but Kuttner and Moore are very much above average. We’re instead given a fictional introduction, as if it were a foreword to a history on the Keeps, with the narrator even telling us that the protagonist, Brian Scott, may not have even existed, so long ago were the exploits of the Free Companies. I know I’m just throwing these names at you, so let me give you some context. The Keeps are underwater city-states—dome structures that are kept away from the cloudy and toxic surface of the planet Venus. As was typical of the time, Venus is not only habitable but teeming with life, being home to volcanic islands and swampy forests, not to mention a vast undersea world. The Keeps, like in feudal Japan, or China prior to the unification, are perpetually at war with each other—not for ideological reasons but for resources. “It is fairly well known that only one factor saved the Keeps from annihilating one another—the gentlemen’s agreement that left war to the warriors, and allowed the undersea cities to develop their science and social cultures.” Rather than fight each other with their own armies, the Keeps hire the Free Companies, which are mercenary groups—bands of outsiders who are not native to Venus and who have no patriotic bone to pick.

The story is set in the far future, but is framed as being told from an even more distant future point; Brian Scott, had he been alive in the first place, would’ve been dead for centuries by the time of the introduction. Indeed we’re told upfront that the Free Companies have been defunct for ages, and this fatalism will permeate the rest of the narrative; we’re also about to find out, however, that this foregone conclusion for the mercenaries is not necessarily a bad thing. A little word of warning first: I’m always a little weirded out when a character in a story has my name. I think that applies to a lot of people. It doesn’t help that Scott is also my dad’s name, so it’s like Our Hero™ here is some amalgamation. To make matters worse, Scott (the character) has a similar disposition to me, as we’ll see: he’s not fond of thinking, and yet he can’t help it, just as he’s not fond of talking and yet when he gets going he waxes philosophical. Even when we first meet him it’s clear that blue (depression, yet also eroticism) is his color. He’s a captain of the Doonemen, one of the Free Companies, and he’s enjoying some off-time when he’s called in by his superior, Cine Rhys, to serve as mentor for a young patriot of Montana Keep (all the Keeps, at least the ones we see, are named after American states), Norman Kane.

The novella is frontloaded with exposition, which normally would be a problem, but I would argue this opening stretch is the best part, since the plot itself is—let’s not say threadbare, but the backstory is more intriguing than the story proper. I can see why Kuttner and Moore would later return to this setting; there’s a lot of room for elaboration. The good news of this future is that humans have colonized Venus and Mars; the bad news is that Earth has apparently been turned into a hollow shell of a planet, following nuclear catastrophe on a planet-wide scale, referred to here rather uncannily as “the Holocaust.” (It had been known internationally since the ’30s that the Nazis were violently persecuting Jews and other minority groups deemed as undesirable, but it would not be until a few years after “Clash by Night” was written that we would know the sheer lengths to which the Nazis would go to eradicate these groups. Allied forces had not yet discovered the death camps.) As a sign of collective guilt, the Keep-dwellers keep signs reminding them of the destroyed home of their ancestors, and the one taboo never to be broken among Free Companions is the use of nuclear weapons. You might’ve also guessed this was written following the dropping of the atomic bomb, but it’s one of those preemptive tales of nuclear fear.

One more thing to establish here, because it plays into Scott’s ensuing relationship with Norman’s sister Ilene and it’s also rather curious to note from a modern perspective. The Free Companions are, not strictly speaking, monogamous; for them it’s customary to have to something of an open marriage, here called a “free-marriage,” in which the partners, since they’re separated for long stretches due to the Free Companions’ travels, are not prohibited from having squeezes on the side. Unusual to read about this not only from a story published in 1943 but one published in Astounding, a publication that was famously puritanical. The love triangle between Scott, his wife Jeana, and Ilene is erotically charged. Ilene herself is an interesting character in concept who sadly goes underutilized, as she considers herself a hedonist—someone who devotes her life to seeking pleasure. Norman and Ilene seem to be opposites but they also might be two sides of the same coin, since Norman wants to join the Doonemen for reasons that appear to be frivolous while Ilene is, by her own admission, given to frivolous ventures all the time. They both contrast with Scott, who is self-serious but also at this point becoming sick of his job as a gun for hire.

Now, I should probably bring up here that the story quotes Rudyard Kipling a couple times—it might be the first American genre SF story to quote Kipling, although I could be wrong about that. It’s a move that anticipates Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson doing the same some years later; what’s different is that unlike Kipling, Heinlein, and Anderson, Kuttner and Moore as far as I can tell were not warmongers. Indeed the quotes do not refer to the virtuousness of battle but to the passing of an age, which makes sense because Kipling lamented the decline of the British empire following World War I and “Clash by Night” is about the twilight hours of the age of the Free Companies. We know in advance these mercenaries won’t be around much longer and Scott himself is keenly aware that the Keeps, once they get over their petty squabbles and unify, will not longer need people like him. War, in the story, is framed as a necessary evil—a stepping stone for a civilization that will at some point no longer need it. Even the phrase “clash by night” refers to the futility and blindness of battle—the fog of war. Thus the upcoming battle between the Free Companions of Montana Keep and Virginia Keep looks to be one last job for Scott.

There Be Spoilers Here

”Clash by Night” runs into a bit of a problem with the plotting, because at some point, naturally, we have to put the moody writing aside and get to the military action. A question you may have asked by now is, “How do the Free Companies fight each other if it’s impractical to fight on land?” By sea, of course! Battleships, submarines, and “flitterboats” which are smaller vessels. An engine failure on one such flitterboat sends Scott and Norman on a detour, and for a stretch the story it becomes something that wouldn’t be out of place in Planet Stories; it also becomes less interesting, in my opinion. I’ve said this before, but sometimes my bias against action writing rears its head. The back end of “Clash by Night” is a planetary adventure followed by a naval battle, and neither gripped me all that much. I get the impression that someone out there, who’s more into pulpy adventure writing, would like the back half more than I did. I just feel like it’s a 20,000-word novella that could’ve been cut down to a novelette. I heard from someone that this is essentially a Moore story, and I have to sort of disagree because I can see Kuttner’s knack for action prose here.

A Step Farther Out

I liked it, I just wish I had more to say. I had been hyping up this particular story in my head for a few months now; it had been on my radar for review for that long. I wouldn’t call the payoff underwhelming, because this would’ve been pretty memorable especially if you were reading it in 1943 and not used to SF about soldiers. It would’ve been written in 1942, so after the Pearl Harbor attack, and following that there were plenty of pro-war stories about (explicitly or subliminally) about letting the Germans or Japanese have it. This is a different type of war narrative and I’m not sure what Kuttner and Moore were responding to here exactly. I would recommend it, but if you’ve never read Kuttner and Moore together than I first recommend checking out “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” “The Twonky,” “Vintage Season,” and for a more overlooked gem, “A Wild Surmise.” I just hope I can get out of this funk I’ve been in so that I can enjoy writing more.

See you next time.
The Observatory: We Need to Rethink the Hugo Award for Best Related Work (Like Seriously)

November 15th, 2023

(Jeannette Ng’s fiery acceptance speech for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, now the Astounding Award. Worldcon, 2019.)

It’s been two months since my last editorial here. I like to think it’s because the last one I wrote was such a fun time that I felt I could rest on my laurels for October. The reality is that I was in the midst of a horrible mental spiral for much of October, and actually a good deal of November so far. I’ve gotten better! At least well enough that I feel I can do this again, which is all well because I’ve had an itch to write about this particular topic for a minute now. It’s something that’s been gnawing at me, but I didn’t wanna jump into it in a white heat for fear of coming off as reactionary. As a disclaimer I want you to know that I’m pretty decidedly left-leaning. I used to be a royal shithead, both politically and just as a person, up to just a couple years ago, but I’ve been working since then to right some past wrongs. This month’s editorial is coming from someone who loves genre fiction and, perhaps more unwisely, the Hugo Awards in a way. Investing in discussing the Hugos is sort of like investing in a spider-themed restaurant.

The Hugos are of course like just about any award, in that they exist as a form of congratulations combined with exposure. Just as people become more interested (supposedly) in a movie if it won the Oscar for Best Picture, so the same might apply to a novel that has a “HUGO AWARD WINNER” sticker slapped on the cover. The Hugos are like the Oscars for genre fiction—except not really; rather it’s more accurate to say the Nebulas are the Oscars for genre fiction. What separates the Hugos from the Oscars or the Grammys or whatever the fuck is that the Hugos are voted on by fans and not necessarily industry people (although it’s possible to be both, as you know). If you buy a membership for a year’s Worldcon then you get voting privileges, regardless of whether you’re actually attending the convention. (That reminds me, I should buy my membership for next year’s Worldcon.) The result is that the voting process for Hugos is, by default, far more democratic than for a lot of other awards; but then there’s perhaps the biggest consequence of this, which is that the Hugos are also notoriously fannish.

I’m trying to remember who said this, but it goes something like, “E. E. Smith was considered a living legend in SF circles, and was a total unknown outside of that.” Of course, even avid SF readers under the age of, say, forty, probably have no clue who Smith is, but the point is that there’s sometimess a gulf between what’s popular among the SF readership and what’s popular with the general public. Ask a random person—better yet, ask someone who claims to be an avid reader—what the Hugo is and they’re unlikely to give an answer. Filmmakers, rather infamously, almost never attend the Hugos, even if they’re expected to win (for Best Dramatic Presentation), because most filmmakers simply don’t care about the Hugos. (It doesn’t help that the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo is looking to be split up YET AGAIN.) An ironic aspect of all this is that even voters don’t seem keen on acknowledging award’s fannish nature, because the fan categories ~~this is relevant to me so throw me a fucking bone here~~ have seen consistently low voter turnout. I’m not even gonna get into fandom politics here, which is another thing that separates the Hugos from most other awards.

However, I do need to talk about a specific category and in doing so I do have to bring up fandom politics nominally, if only for the sake of drawing comparisons. I have nothing against the examples cited per se. The Hugo for Best Related Work started out as the Hugo for Best Non-Fiction Book, and that initial name was straightforward enough if also a little contentious. I’m not sure if it’s fair to compare a biography with an art book, for example, and we could certainly argue over how broad an umbrella “non-fiction” is. However, the works that were in the running for this category were at least slightly comparable with each other; at the very least they existed in the same fucking medium. This would change in 2010 when the award was retitled to Best Related Work (it had been first retitled to Best Related Book, but this is not as big a change), which turned out to have radical (and I would argue disastrous) implications going forward.

In 2010 the nominees were all books; in 2011 you had four books plus one podcast. Now, I don’t think Writing Excuses counts as a fancast since it’s run by professional writers, but it is certainly not a book. Writing Excuses would win the Hugo for Best Related Work in 2013, beating out four books. Now riddle me this, Batman: How would you go about comparing a podcast with a book? How would you be able to say you prefer a podcast over a book, or vice versa? It’d be like if I said I prefer The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress over Ziggy Stardust; the two cannot be compared, despite both being SF, because they’re like athletes in completely different sports. As a voter, how are you supposed to give preference between an author podcast and a fantasy art book? THEY HAVE PRACTICALLY NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER. Sorry, I’m getting carried away and we’re only just getting started, because Best Related Work would soon snowball into a horrible Frankenstein monster—a hodgepodge of wildly disparate works that have naught but the vaguest notion of genre relevance in common.

So 2014. Kameron Hurley’s “‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” is probably a very good article, but it’s also just that—a single article. Beating out three books and a podcast. Hurley also won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer that year (fair enough), so I’m not sure if this second win was necessary; more importantly, I’m not convinced one can pick between (checks notes) an essay, three books, and a podcast. I’m not even gonna dig deep into 2015 and 2016 since a) there was no winner chosen, and b) due to fandom politics it’s pretty obvious the voting had been massively skewed towards—let’s say sources of ill repute. I’ll only say that for 2015 we have three books and two essays, then for 2016 we have three essays and two books. That these nominees were pretty much all shoved down voters’ throats by the same two or three publishers who had an agenda in mind is sort of beside the point, but it does illustrate the insular nature of the Hugos, especially for a category like Best Related Work where only enthusiasts are likely to care enough.

Things go back to “normal” for a couple years, but then there’s 2019. This is a fun one, and by that I mean I would love to show the list of nominees to a small Victorian child because it would probably send them into an epileptic fit. The winner was Archive of Our Own (AO3), which is a pretty great fanfiction site and I even have one or two stories published on there (don’t ask me how to find them). But that’s the thing: it’s a fanfiction site, only realized as a massive collection of works by mostly anonymous contributors. I don’t even know where to begin with this. It’s such a patently absurd idea for a Hugo winner that it’s easy to miss the fact that this was the first year a YouTube video was nominated for a Hugo, with Lindsay Ellis’s video on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy. I like Lindsay Ellis and I like that video, but… how? How does this mesh with anything else? Then we have another website, www.mexicanxinitiative.com, which going by its mission statement is a noble effort, but again… where does this fit? “I think I prefer the website with She-Ra porn over the immigration assistance website.” Then we have three book nominees, as if to remind us what category this is.

I feel like I could keep going, but I don’t know how much that would help. In the past five years we’ve had a fanfiction site, an acceptance speech, and a deliberately bastardized translation of Beowulf as winners for Best Related Work. Three winners and I have no way of comparing them past some super-abstract fashion that would only go so far. Jeannette Ng’s speech on accepting the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (an award that had its name changed because of said speech, which says something) is certainly tenacious and broke the ice (not to mention her call for Hong Kong’s liberation was actually a noble statement, although people have overlooked that part) on what had become an increasingly uncomfortable subject in genre history, but is it really fair to compare it with biographies on Joanna Russ and Robert Heinlein? Clearly something is amiss here. The label of “related work” is so broad that it can mean damn near anything. It’d be like if you had a Hugo for Best Fiction and you pitted short stories up against novels, except it’s even more broad than that because we’ve had videos and podcasts go up against the written word. We have single articles—even blog posts—go up against entire books, and I’m supposed to think that’s not broken. This blog post you’re reading right now could theoretically get nominated for Best Related Work and I’ll be the first to say that’s bullshit.

We need a solution, and I don’t think there’s a solution that will please everyone. The most obvious option (to me, anyway) is to revert the title to Best Non-Fiction Book or Best Related Book. I really don’t think it’s wise to make books share space with videos and websites. That then brings up another problem, though: What do we do with these related works which are not books? We have a few fan categoriess, why not add a couple more to accomidate videos and blog posts? Certainly the maturing of the internet in the 2010s has made it so that some of the best genre-related content comes in the form of video essays. The problem is that we already have too many Hugo categories as is and goddamnit, we’re about to get at least one more. An oversaturation in categories negatively affects voter turnout, and really it’s asking too much of people to keep track of all this shit. I know a few people who spend a good portion of their lives tracking the Hugos, but they’re an extremely small minority and the vast majority of people in fandom (including myself) don’t have the time or energy to deal with there being more fan categories than there are stars in the sky. My point is that this system is broken and it needs fixing.
Serial Review: Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold (Part 2/4)

November 13th, 2023

(Cover by Robert Daniels. Analog, Mid-December 1987.)

The Story So Far

Leo Graf took on an instructing job at the Cay Habitat, an artificial satellite orbiting the planet Rodeo, where the work is hard but the rewards are rich. Leo was to train a group of “quaddies,” test-tube humans born with four arms and no legs, made specially to work in zero gravity. GalacTech, the company behind the quaddies and the ones responsible for Leo’s paychecks, had produced a race of humans to use as slave labor—a reality which does not sit well with Leo at all. Dr. Cay, who came up with the Habitat (itself having been made in secret two decades prior) in the first place, died a year ago, and in his place are Bruce Van Atta, Leo’s supervisor, and Dr. Sondra Yei, who works to socialize the quaddies. Unfortunately tensions are already rising as it becomes clear that the quaddies, despite efforts to isolate them from the human race at large, have already picked up some “bad habits,” like monogamy and a wish to leave the Habitat.

The end of Part 1 saw Tony, his girlfriend Claire, and their infant son Andy sneak off the Habitat and take refuge in a warehouse, still in deep space but at least avoiding a trip to Rodeo which would’ve literally crushed them. Van Atta interrogates Silver but with little result (Van Atta himself had already “corrupted” the quaddies by way of seriously unprofessional behavior, such as having sex with Silver), and to make matters worse Apmad, GalacTech’s VP, has come to the Habitat for an inspection ahead of schedule. So you have a drugged and traumatized quaddie, plus three more who are MIA. Part 1 does what a serial installment should do in that it raises intrigue, builds tension, and then ends on a huge question mark. How will Our Heroes™ get out of this one? You have to stay tuned and find out.

Enhancing Image

The good news is that despite being stowaways, Tony and his family come out of the experience alive—but not unharmed. A frenzied security officer wounds Tony when he was supposed to stun him (having replaced his stun gun with an unregistered pistol), and thu Tony spends pretty much all of Part 2 out of the picture. Indeed Claire spends most of the time off-screen, with the only quaddie then being given a fair amount of screentime here being Silver. That there have been issues taming the quaddies turns out to be a problem without a solution, or rather a problem where the solution would not be worth it, because Leo hears a rumor from one of the shuttle pilots that a new anti-gravity device has not only been invented, but has reached the stage where companies are willing to buy it. The quaddies were made because zero gravity presents a problem for normal humans, but with anti-gravity it would be much easier for normal humans to work in deep space. You thus have a race of people, treated by GalacTech as organic technology, “post-fetal experimental tissue cultures,” about to be outmoded by actual technology. The question then is: What will become of them?

Part 2 is shorter than Part 1 and there seem to be fewer scenes; instead we get several lengthy borderline Socratic dialogues in which Leo and the people running the Cay Project have to confront both the ethical and logistical dilemma of the quaddies. This is the stuff that was hinted at in Part 1, but now that the cat’s out of the bag we’re knee-deep in it, and frankly this installment gripped my interest even more tightly than the first. Like this is the kind of shit that I’m here for. Moral conundrums usually get me going and Falling Free provides a meaty one in the form of, “We typically throw away technology once something better comes along, but what if that technology is people?” Leo’s problem with the quaddies escalates from “How do you protect workers from exploitation when said workers are already slaves?” to “How do you prevent the eradication of a people if legally they don’t even count as a people?” Because, technically speaking, the options GalacTech are providing for the quaddies in light of the anti-gravity device boil down to genocide—either via sterilization or extermination outright. This is a lot for a 300-page hard SF novel.

When confronting Van Atta about the anti-gravity device we get a pretty good line from Van Atta, who is an irrideemable monster but who says something that, unfortunately for Leo, rings true: “There’s only so much one human being can do, Leo.” The bastard is right—actually more right than he’s capable of knowing. There’s only so much one person can do in this situation. The mid-section of Part 2 sees Leo at his lowest point, unable to convince anyone on the Cay Project that these people are worth saving, and to make matters even worse, Leo has developed a crush on Silver despite her only being about half his age. (I don’t recall us being told how old Leo is, but given his 18 years of experience he’s probably somewhere in his forties.) The bright side of all this is that since GalacTech has not offered a third option, and since Leo knows what the quaddies are up against, it’s up to him now to find a solution—with a little help from his friends. The “character’s lowest point” part of the narrative has seemingly passed and now we’re looking at an ascent to victory, my one reservation being that unless Bujold has another trick up her sleeve, this might be too early in the novel to be doing such a plot turn, now that we’re about halfway through.

A few things to note here since I don’t really have anywhere else to put them. I said earlier that this novel is about 300 pages in its book version; as far I can tell the serial and book versions are more or less the same. To my novella-pilled brain 300 pages sounds like a good amount, but even by the ’80s we were seeing SF novels become longer on average. Call it an educated guess, but I think this happened because genre publishing was moving away from serializations, such that by the late ’80s the only magazine which regularly did serials was Analog. Serialization has some implicit demands, such that a novel must be structured in a certain way (there must be chapters which end on a high-tension note that sparks intrigue) and must be—or at least ought to be—of a certain length. The lack of such restrictions meant a novel could be of any length so long as it didn’t piss off the editor, but with those restrictions you would have a more concise work. Bujold wastes very little time on describing locations and people in Falling Free, to the point where Part 2 is mostly he-said-she-said dialogue. I’m not bothered by it, because I don’t like to have my time wasted, but modern readers might want something with more meat and flab on its bones.

Since this is a serial but also since Bujold is a very capable writer, every scene serves a purpose with regards to the plot, and the plot is pretty much always moving forward. Modern conventional wisdom says we should be have more “quiet” moments, where we’re treated to character psychology, but the characters here more exist to serve the plot while still being vividly drawn enough. Despite the deep-space setting, this is still a human narrative. I get the impression that Bujold is too much of a humanist to let her characters be mere cogs in a machine (like say, Hal Clement, although Clement’s talent very much lay elsewhere), although that doesn’t stop her from conceiving a borderline cartoonish villain like Van Atta. This is ultimately an “ideas” novel, but it’s by no means heartless or reactionary.

A Step Farther Out

In her rundown of Hugo nominees up to the year 2000 (very addicting series of articles, by the way), Jo Walton calls Falling Free “minor Bujold,” then adds “but minor Bujold would be a major book from most writers.” I do have to think, if this is minor Bujold then what does major Bujold look like? True, it’s rather small in scale, a little short by today’s standards (fantasy readers might even wrongly call it a novella), but it puts forth a novel concept and explores it in a way that is consistently intriguing. I do have to wonder how conflict will be sustained, because we’re about halfway through the novel now and there’s this creeping sense that the rest may turn into a white savior narrative (no doubt problematic), which would disappoint me a bit. The fact that I’m eagerly looking forward to whether I will be disappointed or not, though, speaks to Bujold’s skill and the novel’s readability.

See you next time.