Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Short Story Review: “Mother” by Philip José Farmer

July 10th, 2023

(Cover by Jack Coggins. Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1953.)

Who Goes There?

I don’t know what to make of Philip José Farmer, but in my defense his peculiar place in SF history is partly what has secured his legacy. It’d be easy to say Farmer is a New Wave author, but he’s a whole generation older than the New Wavers and indeed his roots are distinctly pre-New Wave, despite getting started fairly late as a writer. Farmer was already in his thirties when his debut SF story “The Lovers” was published in the August 1952 issue of Startling Stories, and apparently readers went nuts over it. There was nothing in terms of content (although not style) that quite matched “The Lovers,” as it was rejected by both Astounding and Galaxy for its graphic (for the time) depiction of romance between a human man and an alien woman who appears human enough. Samuel Mines, editor of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, knew he had found a special talent, and Farmer’s first few stories (mostly in Mines’s magazines) led him to winning the Hugo (although nowadays it would be the not-Hugo Astounding Award) for Best New Author. In hindsight this can read as a bit odd, considering Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley debuted the same year as Farmer, but the old saying that sex sells was and continues to be true.

The author spotlight for today’s story, “Mother,” labels it as Farmer’s second story, although this would not have been true unless it was the second story Farmer had sold—which is quite possible. Mines singles out “Mother” as being even more transgressive than “The Lovers,” and despite the latter being more famous I think Mines is right; not only does it go into even more devious territory than “The Lovers,” it’s also the better story! This is a well-structured and engrossing tale of first contact, and I’m about to explain why it works in conjunction with Farmer’s Oedipal hijinks.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, which is on the Archive. I had first heard about “Mother” through its inclusion in the collection Strange Relations, not to be confused with the omnibus of the same title that also includes The Lovers (the novel version) and Flesh. I’ve read The Lovers and Flesh but not any of the stories in Strange Relations, which seem thematically related. Because “Mother” is a very good story it has been reprinted quite a few times elsewhere, most notably in the Farmer tribute collections The Best of Philip José Farmer and The Philip José Farmer Centennial Collection. If you like chunky anthologies there’s also The Science Fiction Century (ed. David G. Hartwell).

Enhancing Image

Paula Fetts and her son Eddie start out as the only survivors of a crash, and things only get worse from there. Paula is a scientist while Eddie, who must be at least in his twenties despite early descriptions of him (more on this later), is a famous opera singer. As with any mother-son relationship where the former pampers the latter, the son is a little… maladjusted. Had Eddie lived in pre-Freudian times he could’ve lived the rest of his life as a shameless mama’s boy, but this is modernity and Farmer knows that such juicy material should not be passed up. Eddie is a bit of hot mess but Paula, wanting to stay close to her boy, pulls some strings so that her son can accompany her on this latest expedition to a charted but uncolonized planet, on the basis that Eddie’s expertise in opera could be used to study the form on human colonies. “That the yacht was not visiting any colonized globes seemed to have been missed by the bureaus concerned.” There are sprinkles of humor throughout the story and they’re surprisingly effective. For example, the sheer morbidity of Eddie not liking to clean up the gibbed remains of the crew (quite literally bones and tissue from the impact) because he doesn’t like the sight of blood. Eddie is, at least symbolically, a child in a man’s body.

The expedition ends before it can even start, with Paula and Eddie being left stranded on the alien planet and with only some portable tech and rations to keep them going. While we’re still at this very early part in the story, before we get to the aliens themselves, I wanna talk about Paula and how interesting she is in terms of her function in the narrative. It was rare for a woman to be the protagonist of an SF story at the time, especially in the adventure mode as with “Mother,” and true enough Paula ends up not filling the protagonist role; she’s undoubtedly smart and competent, but we’re only gonna be in her shoes for a minute before the narrative’s perspective changes profoundly and Paula is, quite intentionally, pushed off-stage. It’s also this opening section that the story is at its most conventional before it goes off the rails (in a good way), with Our Heroes™ using radio (or something like it) to try to find some beacon on the planet, but it’s not too long before they unwittingly get themselves ensnared by the story’s real star.

Eddie and Paula get separated, with the POV now suddenly changing to Eddie’s, with the man-child being trapped in what resembles a huge egg turned on its side, the interior of which feels “soft and yielding—something fleshlike and womanly—almost breastlike in texture and smoothness and warmth, and its hint of gentle curving.” Farmer does not beat around the bush much here. (Also, take a shot every time Farmer uses the word “flesh” and its variants.) At first unsure of his surroundings, Eddie comes to find that he’s inside a very large and very motherly alien, itself unable to move but having tentacles so as to have a good reach both inside and outside. These aliens, which resemble boulders on the outside, hence Our Heroes™ not being aware of their nature at first, are in fact highly intelligent and communicative creatures, with the Mother (with a capital M) Eddie’s inside of even being able to talk to him via Eddie’s radio tech. The Mothers talk in a certain frequency, like they’re FM radio sets, which will prove to bode both good and ill for the humans.

The Mothers are the things on which the story hinges, so let’s talk about them. Often writers struggle (or simply don’t try at all) to create aliens that are not just humanoids with blue skin and funny ears, even though, in terms of probability, we’re far more likely to encounter alien life that’s akin to either starfish or an amoeba. Farmer seemed aware of this from the beginning, as the tragedy of “The Lovers” relies on the alien woman appearing to be more humanoid than she really is; but “Mother” goes a step farther by speculating on how a human might mate with an alien that, while sentient, does not look or behave like a human at all. The Mothers are a single-sex race in that all of the Mothers are female; there are no males of the species—not even disposable things that exist as sperm banks. How do the Mothers reproduce, then? Well, these aliens catch males of other species, only they’re not thought of as males, but as “mobiles.” A mobile, to a Mother, is a male, who will spend time in the egg chamber before getting devoured and released into the environment where the cycle will begin anew. “Mobiles were male. Eddie had been mobile. He was, therefore, a male.” This would intrigue if I found it in a story published in the current year, but for something published seventy years ago it’s kind of astonishing.

Okay, so Eddie and Paula will at some point get eaten by their Mothers, but think also about how I said that the Mothers aren’t exactly discerning about what is male and female. Paula is being kept in a fellow Mother and is apparently acting as that Mother’s mate, but while this can be construed as lesbianism on the Mother’s part, the Mother does not register Paula as being female. It’s almost like gender lines are blurry or something. That Farmer was messing around with this in 1953 should earn him a medal (well, it did get him a Hugo), but that he did so while showing that in only a matter of months he had matured as a storyteller gets him my respect. “Mother” is a novelette, nearly twenty magazine pages, but it feels shorter somehow, even though there’s little action once Eddie gets trapped inside the Mother. The degree to which Farmer explores the alien mindset of the Mothers while also injecting this with humor is admirable.

There Be Spoilers Here

Eddie has spent enough time in the Mother by now that he’s almost become accustomed to it; he has even given his Mother a name, Polyphema, as a sort of mythology gag. Eddie and Polyphema are able to understand each other somewhat, but there were still the problems of a) contacting Paula, and b) escaping. The first gets solved when Eddie’s able to negotiate with Polyphema and talk with Paula from across the aisle, so to speak. While the humans will eventually be eaten as Nature demands, being “semantic” mobiles (in that they’re able to talk with their Mothers) gives their respective Mothers significant prestige among their peers. (Again, while the Mothers are unable to move, they can communicate across considerable distances, and are thus quite talkative, even catty at times.) Paula has a plan to get out of her own Mother (she has no qualms about killing an intelligent alien being that is simply acting according to its nature) soon enough, but Eddie still has to figure a way to get away from Polyphema.

Unfortunately for everyone a bit of miscommunication comes in to deprive of us a happy (i.e., boring) ending. Without thinking Eddie tells Polyphema that Paula, the mobile in the neighboring Mother, is his mother. The mobile is herself female, which strikes Polyphema as a paradox. “Her world was split into two: mobile and her kind, the immoble. Mobile meant food and mating. Mobile meant—male. The Mothers were—female.” When Paula does come Eddie’s way, Polyphema takes her and devours her almost instantly, in which has to be the story’s most shocking moment—even if I anticipated something like this happening. What shocked me even more was the very dark joke to follow Paula’s death, which actually had me cackling a bit. I’m not gonna say it here because it would feel ruined without the proper buildup, but when you see you might feel compelled to do a double take. Farmer can be a real comedian when he feels like it.

Having lost his real mother, and without any chance of escape, let alone finding civilization again, something strange happens to Eddie: he starts to regress, not just mentally but even physically. The longer Eddie stays with the Sluggos (i.e., the pups, who will one day become Mothers themselves) in Polyphema’s sack the more alien he becomes.

He was, in a sense, their father. Indeed, as they grew to hog-size, it was hard for their female parent to distinguish him from her young. As he seldom walked any more, and was often to be found on hands and knees in their midst, she could not scan him too well|. Moreover, something in the heavywet air or in the diet had caused every hair on his body to drop off. He grew very fat. Generally speaking, he was one with the pale, soft, round, and bald offspring. A family likeness.

At the beginning of the story a nearby clock goes backwards in time when the ship crashes—doesn’t stop, but goes back. Farmer brings back this little nugget of symbolism at the end when Eddie, having seemingly met the end of his tether, goes back in time in nearly every way possible—back, even, to being like an infant in his mother’s womb. I knew in advance that “Mother” would end with the human protagonist inside an alien womb, in a Freudian returning-to-the-womb bit, but having actually read it now, the context makes the ending much more effective; it even becomes eerie, although given the alternatives the ending could be worse for Eddie. While having lost his real mother, Eddie is able to leave behind the psychic trauma of human adulthood and will probably now spend the rest of his days in the care of an alien surrogate—one who also happens to be the mother of his children. And they say old SF is unsophisticated.

A Step Farther Out

“Mother” feels like a breath of fresh air especially after the last Farmer story I had read, which was “Don’t Wash the Carats,” a New Wave-era story from one of those goddamn Orbit volumes that I found nigh unreadable hippie garbage. I’m not against hippie-dippy literature and I’m not even against Farmer when he does it necessarily, being one of the few people in the world who likes “Riders of the Purple Wage,” but I just like my literature to read like it was deliberately constructed. Not only is “Mother” deliberately constructed but it shows that Farmer was on to some weird shit at a time when most genre authors were playing by the old rules. Its style is pulpy, yes, but it’s clearly written in the adventure mode so as to more effectively subvert expectations we have about old-school first contact narratives. Tts subject matter also points toward a grand liberalization of the field that had neither a name nor a shape yet… but it was on its way.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Night Court” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

July 6th, 2023

(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Weird Tales, March 1953.)

Who Goes There?

When it comes to authors I’ve never read before I always feel a bit nervous when writing this section, because I have to give some context for an artist whose work I have next to no context for. This was not even gonna be my first Mary Elizabeth Counselman story, as I had planned at some point to cover her back in March as part of my Weird Tales tribute, but plans change and now I can’t even remember who I replaced her with. It’s a shame, because while she doesn’t get brought up as nearly as often as H. P. Lovecraft or even C. L. Moore, Counselman was clearly loyal to Weird Tales in its first incarnation, continuing to get published in it up to the bitter end. Doubly a shame because the first Counselman story I ended up reading, todays’ pick, is rather dull, and I don’t have much to say about it—although there are a few points of interest I’ll be sure to write about here. What the hell, I’m not getting paid to do any of this, and this work will not redeem me, nor will it probably turn me into a more understanding person.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. I was surprised to find “Night Court” has been reprinted several times, most notably in Witches’ Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women (ed. Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini) and Great American Ghost Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Frank D. McSherry, and Charles G. Waugh). It’s definitely a ghost story, but I wouldn’t call it great.

Enhancing Image

We follow Bob: Korean War veteran, 22-year-old husband-to-be, mostly upstanding citizen, and a bit of an asshole. Bob has the very bad habit of reckless driving—not road rage exactly, but an immense carelessness that, we’re told, has gotten him into big trouble a couple times already. If not for a certain family connection in the local legal system Bob would probably be seeing jail time, but thanks to a powerful uncle he just once again got no more than a slap on the wrist for running over an elderly black man (these are not the words used in-story, mind you). Unluckily for Bob, but perhaps for future potentials victims of his behavior on the road, Bob is about to take a detour against his will… into the Twilight Zone.

Jokes aside, this does read like it could be adapted (and perhaps elevated) into a classic Twilight Zone episode, although more because of its structure and moralism than the quality of the thing. Bob is a one-note character, a good-for-nothing who exists in the context of the story to be taught a lesson, but even so there are a couple things about him that struck me. For one, I’ve read a good deal of ’50s SFF at this point, and shockingly little of what I’ve read directly mentions the Korean War; indeed the only SFF author I can think of off the top of my head who’s a Korean War veteran would be Jerry Pournelle. Mind you that the cease fire would not be declared until several months after “Night Court” was published, so this was very much an ongoing conflict when Counselman wrote it. Also, making the villain protagonist of your story a military veteran pre-Vietnam is certainly a choice. Bob talks about how he’s supposedly a hero for “killing fourteen North Koreans” but is labeled a hazard for accidentally killing a couple people on the road. He may have PTSD, but this is sadly not elaborated upon.

After seemingly having run over a little girl whilst rushing to meet up with his fiancée, Bob gets pulled over by a highway patrolman—only this is not a normal man, going by appearances, his thick goggles obscuring his eyes but also giving him an almost skeletal look. “Bob squirmed under the scrutiny of eyes hidden behind the green glass; saw the lips move… and noticed, for the first time, how queerly the traffic officer held his head.” The officer’s neck is craned as if it had been broken or mangled, yet surely the officer still lives. Things only get weirder (although not that weird) when the officer, ignoring the girl under Bob’s car, takes Bob in to be judged at the night court—which is like normal court but sPoOoOoKy. We have, by this point, pretty thoroughly left the confines of everyday reality, hence the Twilight Zone comparison, although once I realized what kind of story this was I have to admit my mind sort of went on autopilot from hereon out.

I knew nothing about “Night Court” going into it other than that it would be a tale of the supernatural, entailing some kind of judgment, and these were not incorrect assumptions! Unfortunately what I got was also a PSA on how you should watch where you’re going on the road, and it’s like… I get it, this was back before we even had seat belt laws; cars were little more than metal death traps. At the same time, I’m legally blind, so I don’t have a driver’s license, let alone a car myself. You may recall in high school how you were taught about the perils of drunk driving and texting on your phone while driving, that sort of thing. As someone who is faaaaaaaar more likely to be the victim of a hit-and-run than a perpetrator, I feel qualified to say that while this is an important lesson to learn when you’re young in the real world, it does not make for compelling storytelling. We learn that the people overseeing Bob’s trial in the night court are all victims of auto accidents, including the old man he had recently killed, and I get that this makes sense—I just don’t find it that interesting or worthy of study.

In 1953 this was probably seen as more necessary to get across in writing, but after decades of TV PSAs I think we’ve moved well past the point where a story like “Night Court” feels worthy of note.

There Be Spoilers Here

I will say, though, that the twist was not one I was expecting. You would expect the girl Bob had run over to appear at the night court as his most recent victim, but actually the girl does not exist—yet. The judge says that the girl will be born years from now, and if Bob doesn’t change his ways then he will kill this girl somewhere down the line. This gets a single golf clap from me. Less interesting is that said girl is implied to be Bob’s future daughter at the very end, which I don’t think is a necessary touch. I was expecting the story to end in a more predictable but tragically ironic way, like Bob promising to better himself only to get killed in an accident by another reckless driver, but the ending we got was anti-climatic by comparison; not as predictable, true, but it also left me feeling a little empty. Maybe Counselman had become weary of conventional twist endings? I would’ve gone for something more gruesome is what I’m saying.

A Step Farther Out

Not that all ghost stories have to be scary, but when I’m reading one I expect to feel something in connection with the supernatural; not always fear, but often an uncertainty, a sense of mystery at the unexplainable. The Turn of the Screw is not what I would call scary, but it is effective and memorable as a psychological study and as an extended metaphor—a metaphor for what we’re not so sure about. For “Night Court” I felt either detached or a little annoyed at the preachiness of it, which strikes me as old-timey even for 1953. It’s not scary or eerie, certainly, but it also reads like Counselman is wagging her finger at the reader and expecting us to take an important life lesson away from it. I usually don’t like moralism in my fiction (which is funny, given I’m a big Twilight Zone fan), but I’m willing to forgive that if the message is given a humane (not to say delicate) touch—only “Night Court” is not in touch with what I would call the pains of the human condition.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Watchbird” by Robert Sheckley

July 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Mel Hunter. Galaxy, February 1953.)

Who Goes There?

The years immediately following World War II saw a profound uptick in humor in science fiction—at least that which was published in the magazines. Almost overnight we went from hard-nosed narratives about scientists solving puzzles to inept military men and Joe the plumber getting more than what they bargained for with whatever the problem of the week was. We saw some very fine court jesters come to prominence in the post-war period, including C. M. Kornbluth, William Tenn, and of course, Robert Sheckley. While he hit the ground running in 1952, submitting to every outlet under the sun, Sheckley quickly became Galaxy‘s comedian of choice, especially during the H. L. Gold years. The two were a perfect match for each other, what with Gold’s desire for more urbane SF and Sheckley being perhaps the most aggressively urbane writer in the field then.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. As is typical of early Galaxy, this isssue is stacked, with “A Saucer of Loneliness” by Theodore Sturgeon, “Four in One” by Damon Knight, and the last installment of Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak (I’ll review this last one eventually) being other notable picks. “Watchbird” was soon included in Sheckley’s first collection, Untouched by Human Hands, and nowadays you can find it in the collection Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, which has a fancy NYRB edition. Most importantly, for those of you who are too lazy and/or don’t have the cash to spare, “Watchbird” fell out of copyrgith at some point and is available to read perfectly legit on Project Gutenberg, found here.

Enhancing Image

We’re gonna keep this relatively short and snappy, aight?

The central question that kicks off the story is that of murder. Police may be able to catch a suspect in a murder, but they can’t prevent a murder. Solution? Create a machine that can detect acts of aggression from a distance and intercept before a murder can be committed. Gelsen, the closest we have to a protagonist, is a government contractor who helps in the production of “watchbirds,” which are small flying machines that, while not self-aware, are programmed to comprehend a definition of “murder” and to act according to that definition. Of course this is a government initiative, since while the people in the story are not too bright, they’re at least smart enough to know that such a contraption should not be left in the hands of the “free” market. “Like the telephone service, it was in the public’s best interests. You couldn’t have competition in watchbird service.” Thus the US is essentially split into provinces for watchbird manufacturers, all being connected to the federal government but each having a sphere of control.

We’re gonna be following a lot of characters, most of whom are nameless, but Gelsen is the closest to realizing he’s in a Robert Sheckley story; he has a bad feeling that the watchbirds will do more than what was intended, although tragically he’s unable to articulate how this would happen. As I said, the watchbirds are robots, and not terribly intelligent at that; they are, however, able to learn—but not in the way that humans learn things. Because watchbirds are able to communicate with each other over long distances, without input from any human central control, what one watchbird learns will quickly get to others. What happens, then, when a watchbird expands the definition of murder? They all expand the definition of murder—into a shape that the human creators did not anticipate. This is what we might call a comedy of errors, and as is typical with Sheckley, “Watchbird” is very much a comedy, albeit with a lot of death and destruction.

If you’ve read enough Sheckley (and you don’t have to read too much to get the point) then you know he’s a big fan of the “science gone amok” type of narrative, wherein human inventors, apparently lacking common sense, fail to consider the ramifications of their new creation. The purpose of a watchbird is to stun what it perceives as an aggressor before the aggressor can commit murder—but what constitutes aggression? Just as importantly, the watchbird is supposed to help potential human victims, but this turns out to be too narrow a definition for the dumb robots. Watchbirds, while being designed to prevent murder, are also not opposed to killing people by way of omission; they do not consider, for one, that stunning an elderly person or someone with a weak heart might kill them. At first this goes unnoticed. The watchbirds seem to be doing their job, which mind you does not include other types of crime. “Of course, there were still robberies. Petty thievery flourished, and embezzlement, larceny, forgery and a hundred other crimes.” But the murder rate’s gone down! For now…

Gelsen is the closest we have to a protagonist, true, but he doesn’t do much—not that he can do much. The meat of “Watchbird” is the several micro-plots wherein random people are thwarted or ruined by watchbird intereference, including a hitman who’s killed without his would-be victim even being aware of it, a doctor who is forced to watch his patient die because a watchbird mistakes the doctor’s operating for aggression, and other one-off plots that function to show the watchbirds’ evolution—or rather their increased mangling of their prime directive. It’s all morbid and chuckle-worthy, but what’s important in a storytelling context is that Sheckley does not waste time at all here; his prose is on the extreme beige side, with people and places getting basically no description at all. The result is that this is a dialogue-heavy story where the action is conveyed in short bursts. A. E. van Vogt had in mind that a scene should be around 800 words and contain a plot complication; for Sheckley the wordage seems to be boiled down to 300 words a scene. The action escalates quickly, from normalcy to the watchbirds killing almost as many people as they’re saving.

This turns out to be only the beginning.

There Be Spoilers Here

Soon the watchbirds stop trying to prevent the “murder” of just humans. First living animals, then later electrical items like cars and radios—and the watchbirds themselves. The watchbirds come close to achieving sentience but don’t quite get there, which almost feels like a subversion of the classic “robot magically becomes self-aware” trope. These robots fail to understand, for one, that cars are not killed when they’re turned off—that cars are not, in fact, living things. As I said, watchbirds do not comprehend killing via omission (as opposed to commission), thus they don’t realize that by preventing farmers from harvesting crops they’re forcing millions of people to starve. Things escalate to the point where the US’s ecosystem falls into dire jeopardy, with watchbirds preventing predators from killing prey and hunters from killing the hunted. Even killing plant life for the sake of agriculture becomes murder in the eyes of the watchbirds. “No one had told the watchbirds that all life depends on carefully balanced murders.” Again the watchbirds eventually take themselves to be living things, but they lack the intelligence to go against their programming—they can only expand the parameters of their programming and then act on it.

Now, I’m not sure what Sheckley believes in. A gripe I have with the guy is that while he’s a good satirist, it’s hard to get a read on what he’s advocating and even what he’s really against, to the point where it can read as nihilism. I can assume that Sheckley is against the death penalty, but I don’t know that, nor can I really gauge that from reading this story. The watchbirds at first stop a guy from being fried in the electric chair (cool) but later prevent a doctor from saving a patient’s life (not so cool). Aside from a general message about hubris and failing to take into account the consequences of invention I’m not sure if a deeper reading is possible. It doesn’t help that I more or less anticipated the ending, which actually reminded me of an even earlier Sheckley story, “The Leech,” wherein (SPOILERS) the human protagonists find a short-term solution to the problem—only for it to be implied that said solution will cause an even bigger problem in the long run. Sheckley wrote a lot, so naturally he’d resort to a formula.

A Step Farther Out

It’s easy to stereotype early Galaxy as being full of witty satires on post-war American life, and admittedly Sheckley’s work doesn’t help with that; but if you can get past the fact that the humor is of its time, “Watchbird” is a pretty entertaining yarn. Despite being one of Sheckley’s longer early stories, it feels shorter than it is, with the rapid scene changes and punchy paragraphs constantly pushing the reader along until we’ve reached the foreboding climax. The joke does not overstay its welcome. It also helps that we avoid some of Sheckley’s nastier habits, such as his playful misogyny. “Watchbird” is a good introduction to Sheckley’s style but also the kind of SF humor that Gold wanted when Galaxy was at its peak.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: July 2023

July 1st, 2023
(Cover by Jack Coggins. F&SF, August 1953.)

At the beginning of Moby Dick you may recall that Ishmael looks for seafaring jobs whenever he gets hit with one of his depressive episodes. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…” All that. I normally rotate through short stories, novellas, and serials for my reviews, but there are times when the latter two categories weary me deeply, and I wish to take a break from those more demanding tasks. Back in March I restricted myself to just short stories, and from the pages of Weird Tales more specifically. The timing felt right. I’ve come to realize that to alleviate myself of my review schedule I would do short stories only in March, July, and October of each year. Rest assured that I’ll be reviewing spooky stories for October, just like I did last year and will certainly do next year. But what about July? This is a question that’s been dogging me, because while my review roster for this past March had a theme to it, July proved more challenging.

Some months back I wrote an editorial on the state of SF in 1953, seventy years ago, and how it served as a high-water mark for the field, embodying the very height of the magazine boom—a level of fruitfulness that would not be matched until the 2010s. In the US alone there were over twenty SFF magazines running in 1953, versus less than half that a decade later. You could say the first half of the ’50s was one of the field’s summer periods, when there was this sense that life would never be this large again, nor would the market be this inclusive. It’s an argument I think is worth making, but now I think I’ll argue again—only this time by way of demonstration. We thus have nine short stories, all with 1953 dates, and all from different magazines. I couldn’t even include something from Astounding, which anyway was the least interesting of the Big Three™ at the time. I’m gonna be covering a nice mix of science fiction and fantasy, including a couple authors I’ve not read anything by before—plus a few old favorites.

The short stories are as follows:
1. “Watchbird” by Robert Sheckley. From the February 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. 1953 was a boom year for Sheckley, who had debuted in 1952 but who would amass a reputation and a large body of short fiction (something like thirty short stories) in his first full year as an author. Sheckley submitted to every outlet under the sun but he was particularly fond of Galaxy, to the point where he seemed to show up in every other issue of that magazine in the ’50s.
2. “Night Court” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman. From the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales. Yes, Weird Tales was still around at this point, even if it was no longer the leading magazine for short fantasy (then again, who was in the lead?). Counselman had debuted in Weird Tales a couple decades earlier and she was one of those authors who stayed loyal to it to the bitter end. I was ssupposed to read my first Counselman story back in March, but plans change. Now we start in earnest.
3. “Mother” by Philip José Farmer. From the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Farmer came to the field late, already deep in his thirties, but his first story, “The Lovers” (the novella version), made an immediate splash and helped earn Farmer a special Hugo for most promising new writer. “The Lovers” was transgressive as far as ’50s pulp SF goes, and it’s not surprising that Farmer would later fit in with the New Wave writers, what with the sexual weirdness…
4. “The Seven Black Priests” by Fritz Leiber. From the May 1953 issue of Other Worlds. Leiber’s one of my favorites, and also one of the most consistent SFF writers of the ’50s and ’60s just ignore The Wanderer, having debuted in 1939 but staying strong almost to the end of his life. “The Seven Black Priests” is a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story, a sword-and-sorcery tale that oddly enough saw print in the SF-oriented Other Worlds. The early ’50s were not great for fantasy.
5. “Paycheck” by Philip K. Dick. From the June 1953 issue of Imagination. I know I covered him only a couple months ago, but what can I say, I’m a Dickhead. Like with Sheckley, Dick had debuted the previous year but really showed what he was made of in ’53, with about thirty short stories published that year and with some of them going on to be classics. As with a good deal of Dick’s work, “Paycheck” would serve as the basis for a (not very good from what I’ve heard) movie.
6. “Captive Audience” by Ann Warren Griffith. From the August 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. A certain aquaintance (cough cough) had pointed me toward this one. Griffith apparently wrote her fair share of mainstream fiction, but she only wrote two SFF stories, both in the early ’50s and both in the pages of F&SF. Curious how you’d see authors from outside the genre magazine bubble feel comfy with submitting to F&SF.
7. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” by Margaret St. Clair. From the September 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. St. Clair is a fairly recent discovery for me, and one who’s quickly becoming a favorite. In the ’50s she was one of the more gifted SFF short story writers—though sadly her sstories are often too short to spend a couple thousand words on. (It gets weird if the review’s length comes close to that of the story it’s covering.) This one does not look so slight.
8. “Wolf Pack” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. From the September-October 1953 issue of Fantastic. I could theoretically review all of Miller’s short fiction for this site, though that would take about twenty years at the rate I’m going. Miller is known now for A Canticle for Leibowitz, but he also left behind a fruitful body of short fiction (given this all happened in less than a decade). “Wolf Pack” is one of the more obscure stories in an already overlooked oeuvre; it looked appetizing.
9. “Little Girl Lost” by Richard Matheson. From the Octover-November 1953 issue of Amazing Stories. Matheson is a favorite of mine—and unlike most genre authors of his generation he would make it big as a screenwriter in Hollywood, working in the ’50s onward on a variety of projects from Roger Corman movies to Star Trek. “Little Girl Lost” was one of several Matheson stories adapted (by Matheson himself, in this case) into a classic Twilight Zone episode.
It’s not vacation, because I’ll still be reading and writing as usual, but I’ll be taking time off from novellas and serials. For those who are still in school, summer represents a time for hanging out with friends and going to the beach and whatnot; in other words, doing what you love most with the time you have. The art of the short story is a passion of mine and I wanna take the time to cover more that may be of interest.

Oh, and I changed the site’s name partially. The verbosity of the previous name was getting to me and I hungered for something more straightforward; that and this new one better matches the URL. Anyway…

Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “The Totally Rich” by John Brunner

June 27th, 2023

(Cover artist uncredited. Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1963.)

Who Goes There?

John Brunner is kind of a puzzle box to me: he wrote a whole lot of garbage that was clearly written to pay the bills, and yet there’s a fraction of his output that people I know will swear by as being works of genius. Was Brunner a genius? Maybe. He actually reminds me a bit of Philip K. Dick, whom I do consider a genius, albeit a deeply troubled one. Both men entered the field around the same time and took to writing genre fiction as a full-time thing, which was certainly not the norm in the ’50s, the result being that much of what these men wrote was middling at best. Of course, Brunner was a teenager when he first got published, and his work (what I’ve read, anyway) reads like that of a man who was a decade older than he really was. Today’s story, “The Totally Rich,” is a more mature and downbeat affair than I was expecting—given Brunner would’ve only been 27 when he wrote it. This was not long before he would start work on arguably his magnum opus, Stand on Zanzibar, but even after the Hugo win for that novel his works did not sell. Brunner’s career reads in part like a bad joke.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1963 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, which is on the Archive. “The Totally Rich” has been collected a few times, most notably in The Best of John Brunner where it serves as the opening salvo (just mind the hideous cover). There’s also the early Brunner collection Out of My Mind, which can be found used and if you’re not up for that there’s an ebook edition—bearing in mind it’s Open Road Media (ugh).

Enhancing Image

The narrator is Derek Cooper, an inventor who normally would be the type to slave away at his work in some basement whilst surviving a shitty day job, but who had the good luck to help a very wealthy (unbeknownst to Derek at the time) man named Roger Gurney. In olden times a landowner would hire an artist for a certain project and act as their patron, providing them food and shelter and whatnot so the work could get done; so the same applies here, although the “shelter” Derek gets turns out to be a lot weirder. Derek moves to the South American fishing village of Santadora—only Santadora is not a real village, without real villagers and real fishermen. Even Derek’s colleagues during his time working on his latest invention turn out to be actors. The woman who’s been overseeing Derek’s project, Naomi, is herself an enigma; even her real name is unknown.

We’re just getting started, by the way.

I had never seen [Naomi] wearing anything but black, and tonight it was a black blouse of handspun raw silk and tight black pants tapering down to black espadrilles. Her hair, corn-pale, her eyes, sapphire-blue, her skin, luminous under a glowing tan, had always been so perfect they seemed unreal. I had never touched her before.

Derek’s project of the last year, so called the Cooper Effect, is only peanuts compared to what Naomi has in mind (she’s the one really running the show, no Roger), which turns out to be nothing less than the resurrection of a human being. Naomi is unspeakably rich; money is not an issue for her. We find that Naomi was, prior to this all this, in love with some man whose name we never learn (she only refers to him as him), who had unfortunately died prior to the story’s beginning. Being rich can get you virtually everything in the world, but it can’t bring back the dead—or can it? It’s hard to describe, but the idea is that Derek must construct, using materials Naomi has given him, a homunculus or robot reproduction of the lost lover. I think that’s the idea, anyway. Truth be told, the parameters of Derek’s new invention in progress are unclear (we’re not given a clear idea, for one, of what is and is not possible until towards the end, and even then…), but then this also seems to be part of the point: Naomi remains, to some degree, unknowable.

When I picked up “The Totally Rich” I thought it would be a more blatant satire of the wealthy, something akin to Roger Zelazny’s “The Graveyard Heart,” but Brunner has something more nuanced in mind. Derek, who is not a rich man himself but who had been basically living in luxury for a year up the time the story starts, is the modern equivalent of one of those painters and sculptors from the Renaissance who would accept patronage. We’re in the future, but it’s not clear how far in the future, the result being that it’s hard to point out something that now reads as dated. Certainly the unlimited credit cards Naomi offers Derek as compensation for his services still sound appetizing to pretty much all of us. Santadora, the propped-up fake village, is itself far from a “futuristic” location, which helps the story fulfill a sense of timelessness. I suspect Brunner intended this effect.

As we know, rich people are capable of some truly outlandish things. “Yes, Santadora had been created in order to permit me to work under ideal conditions,” Derek admits. And the unlimited credit cards. And even the fact that somehow there aren’t any mosquitos in this tropical climate. Naomi is capable of anything—except for one thing, and no, it’s not even being able to bring back the dead. There is something off about Naomi; she’s the mystery that keeps the whole plot going. No Naomi, no story. In a way this could be read as a romance, since while Naomi is trying to resurrect her lover, Derek senses his feelings for this mysterious woman grow—into what? Not love in the traditional sense, although given that these two have been basically working side by side for the past year it’s not like they’ve never talked about. It’s like Derek, who at heart is still the kid who fiddles with a Rubik’s cube, is drawn to Naomi because he doesn’t understand her.

This could easily devolve into cringe-worthy wish-fulfillment if Derek’s narration wasn’t so grounded in—not an average person’s view, but someone who knows what it’s like to create things for money. The artist as a plaything for the rich and idle. Brunner himself so desperately wanted to make a good living off of his writing, if not necessarily to become rich, though one has to think (I say this now, I’ve yet to read Jad Smith’s monograph on Brunner) he wanted to become one of idle class and not one of those who had to scrape by on pumping out mediocre fiction. Maybe he even wanted to be in Derek’s position and have some rich fuck bankroll his passion projects. Derek is a scientist, true, but his role here is much more easily understood as an artist whose patron is also his muse. The climax of the story, and the tragic epiphany contained therein, would not be if Derek was simply repulsed by the almost unbelievable scope of Naomi’s wealth.

There Be Spoilers Here

Something that does not occur to Derek until it’s too late is that there’s a reason why the passage of time in Santadora has seemingly frozen still; why nobody wears a watch and why there are no clocks around. Well, except for the one. Our Heroes™ find, sort of tucked away as if someone had hidden it and then fogot to retrieve it, “a tall old grandfather, bigger than me, its pendulum glinting on every ponderous swing.” It’s a normal grandfather clock, yet this sends Naomi almost into a frenzy, and Derek has to move the damn thing itself and dispose of it however he can. Time, for Naomi, is the enemy. After this event, Derek and Naomi hit the climax of their relationship, going to bed together (a bit of an unnecessary scene), only for Derek to find Naomi missing the next morning. Finally, coming in like a dark cloud or a raven, Roger shows up (he’d been offscreen up to this point) to give Derek the worst news he’ll hear for a long time.

Naomi drowned herself. “She couldn’t swim,” Roger adds. “Of course.” The prospect of wsiting years to see her lover resurrected proved to be too much. The worst part is that it needn’t be that way: Derek had figured out (too late) how he could finish his project in a relatively short span of time. But even then, that might not’ve been enough. Naomi had no time left—or rather she thought she didn’t have time left. She was getting older, though she put so much money and resources into keeping her looks. Some people die for love, but many more die from lack of it. Money can’t buy love, and it can’t buy time either. The rich, who in most ways are masters of the world, live as enigmas, unknowable even to each other. With Naomi dead, Derek’s work is over; he can’t even bring himself to accept those credit cards. There’s disgust (it’s clear that Brunner detests the rich, though this clashes with his desire to become one of them), but there’s also a great deal of pity for this class of people that has all but isolated itself from the human race. I did not think Brunner could do tragedy, but there it is.

A Step Farther Out

I had to reread some passages a couple times to get what was happening, but this is very much a story worth rereading. Brunner demonstrates a subtlety here that I did not previously know, even given the more experimental parts of Stand on Zanzibar. Yet “The Totally Rich” almost reads as allegorical, given its tight focus and leaning toward symbolism—a fact which, aside from a sly remark or two from Derek, passes us by without humor. Despite being very much science fiction the “science” aspect plays such a tangential role that I’m not even sure what the science here is; for one I still can’t recall what the Cooper Effect is supposed to be. This could’ve worked as fantasy, with Derek’s knack for invention replaced with wizardry. But the point I wanna make here is that while I can’t say for certain when Brunner “came of age,” given how vast his oeuvre is, I feel like “The Totally Rich” could serve as a benchmark for “mature” Brunner.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “The Oceans Are Wide” by Frank M. Robinson

June 24th, 2023

(Cover by Robert Gibson Jones. Science Stories, April 1954.)

Who Goes There?

It’s become unofficially a mission of mine to cover every recipient (all are, as of right now, eligible for review) of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for this site. The idea behind the Redicovery Award is that it’s given (nearly always posthumously) to genre authors who have, for one reason or another, been left behind by fandom’s (admittedly fickle) collective memory. Time is ruthless to pretty much all of us. A few authors who were active half a century ago still get talked about in fandom discussions, but most do not. The Rediscovery Award is for those who deserve to be, well, rediscovered. Frank M. Robinson received the Rediscovery Award in 2018, and while I had not read even a word of his prior to this review, his life and varied career are well worth considering. You see, Robinson was one of the first queer authors of magazine SFF, at least in the US.

Like a lot of genre writers round his age, Robinson got his start in the field during the height of the magazine boom in the first of the ’50s; he debuted in 1951. In the case of Robinson this period seemed to serve as a training ground, where he would work his craft at short lengths before (much later, mind you) writing novels in the “technothriller” mode. In between these points in his career as a genre writer he got involved rather profoundly in the blooming gay rights movement in the ’70s, to the point where he was associated with Harvey Milk. The book of his that most interests me has to be Robinson’s memoir, Not So Good a Gay Man, published a few years after his death. Despite not putting himself out there as a public figure he clearly worked to better the lives of his brethren, and for his efforts he was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 2009.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1954 issue of Science Stories, which is on the Archive. Not to be confused with Science Fiction Stories. I also wish more magazines from the time had rough word counts in the table of contents. The most recent printing was in 1995. The two most recent anthologies this was in were edited by the same people; okay, but it’s three people. We have Starships and The Mammoth Book of Vintage Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1950s, both edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. A fresh reprinting may be in order.

Enhancing Image

Some stories would have the fact that we’re on a generation ship be the twist, but here that’s the name of the game. We’re onboard the Astra, in a search of a habitable planet after a few centuries of being stuck in a huge tin can. We meet Matty, who at the story’s beginning is a whimsical ten-year-old who hangs out by his lonesome and listens to his “sound box” for fun; too bad for Matty that he happens to be the protagonist of this story. Matty’s father is the Director, the leader (perhaps in name only) of the ship, and the Director is on his death bed. Because the Director’s position is inherited, like that of a monarch, Matty is next in line despite being a scrawny kid. Even more unfortunately it takes all of five minutes for Matt’s immediate family, including his uncle Seth, aunt Reba, and cousin Jeremiah, to start plotting his demise once his old man kicks the bucket.

Matty’s nurse recues him while there’s a manhunt going on and points him in the direction of the Predict, a mysterious but supposedly powerful figure who lurks in the forward section of the ship, an “immortal man whom nobody had seen—the stories went—for the last twenty-five years.” Matt will need to survive, and also need to be trained, and the Predict can provide this—at a bit of a price, it will turn out. The opening section of “The Oceans Are Wide” is paced a bit oddly, as I expected there to be more time spent in finding the Predict, but Matty finds his whereabouts so easily that I started to wonder why this mysteriouss man didn’t get more visitors. Oh well. The Predict is the man Matty is looking for, and more. With characters in this story I’ll normally only refer to them by their first names, but in the case of the Predict I’ll make an exception, as his name is Joseph Smith. Hmmm. Be sure to put a pin in this one.

Try not to take this out of context, but Joseph Smith is a bit of an ASSHOLE. Normally in these situations where there’s a wise mentor and a child protagonist the mentor, while sometimes harsh, has the child’s best interests in mind. Not Joseph Smith. “The Oceans Are Wide” is a coming-of-age narrative on its face, but as we’ll see it entails what amounts to the destruction of the individual’s happiness in the name of the greater good. Matty may be safe from his murderous family, but over the years he’ll learn to become a real bastard of a political maneuverer. Something else that’s curious is that much of the narrative sees Matty going under a different identity, being taken in by a foster family and spending the rest of his youth as a supposed nobody, with Matty the Director-to-be being presumed MIA by everyone else. The rightful heir to the throne evades said throne for his safety, only to return when the time is right—except…

I’ve heard elsewhere that Matty, despite rather tenuously having a female love interest (it goes nowhere, don’t think about it) here, is coded as a queer youth who has to hide his true identity for the sake of survivor; but of course it’s not just that. Robinson takes what must’ve been even at the time the standard procedure for politics in generation ship narratives (namely that these stories tend to endorse, actively or unwittingly, authoritarian models of government) and not only paints it a darker shade of grey but also uses the ensuing personal tragedy as a metaphor for growing up as a gay man in a time and place where being that was immensely dangerous. We queer people find that we have to, at some point, betray our own values and even our own sense of self for the sake of survival. Matty has to sacrifice pretty much any chance at personal happiness so that he could take to the throne in the future, which would be bad enough except Joseph Smith is not ambiguous about what kind of leader he wants Matty to be. Smith opposes democracy on the Astra, preferring a more… hands-on leader.

Of course Smith is the one really running the show here; like his father before him Matty will serve as little more than a puppet for the Predict, although according to Smith his late father was a shitty puppet who would not follow orders. Smith is, in most ways, a scoundrel. “Matty realized with sudden insight that he hated the Predict. He hated the remorseless logic, the constant denial of self for ship.” It’s not totally clear if we’re supposed to think of Joseph Smith as a heroic figure or a villain who happens to have a decent goal in mind, but Matty’s occasional thoughts on the man and Matty’s position as a queer surrogate suggest that at best Smith is to be understood as an anti-hero. If this was a Robert Heinlein or Poul Anderson story Smith would probably be rewritten to be more snarky, more outwardly “intelligent,” and framed more as a fine fellow—only that Robinson has other plans in mind. Indeed we get a quote from Machiavelli at one point, which suggests that Joseph Smith’s vision of leadership on the Astra is tyrannical. The creepy part is that Smith believes, all but explicitly, that tyranny is necessary in order to preserve “civilization,” for the greater good.

In fairness to Smith, life on the Astra was already a struggle. The population is strictly regulated, with families being allowed children only if there’s room available and with everyone being forcebly euthanized when they reach the age of sixty (I assume in Earth years). Introducing democracy, even if Smith supported the idea, would probably take generations, as there’s a violently reactionary monarchal system in place, hence the Game of Thrones antics at the beginning. The Astra used to be one of several generation ships coming out of a ruined Earth, but for several reasons the other ships were destroyed or were lost. Smith knows all this due to his incredibly advanced age, despite looking like a thirty-year-old man, a question that will not get answered till much later. While he’s a shady figure, to say the least, it’s not hard to understand why Smith would be preoccupied with saving the Astra, even if it meant breaking a few eggs. Speaking of which…

There Be Spoilers Here

When Matty finally becomes Director, with Seth relinquishing the position on the basis of age, he introduces some radical changes to the ship as it heads to what looks to be a habitable planet. The maximum age of sixty is removed, with the logic being that the shipmates-turned-colonists will need elders to help form civilization on the ground. Sound enough. Despite all the shit he’s gone through and the authoritarian politics Joseph Smith crammed into his head, Matty still shows a capacity for mercy. When they get to this first planet they find it’s… actually pretty welcoming to humans. Not only is there life on the planet but there’s plenty of food and, as far as the colonists can tell, no animals that would prevent a serious threat. Matty has a schedule set for the colonists, since there’s work to be done—only nobody wants to work. Nobody has to work here. “But they didn’t get back to the schedule that week. Nor that month. In six weeks, the schedule was forgotten.” If this was a Ray Bradbury story there might be some secret mischievous alien race at work, but the catch with this planet is that there is no catch.

Joseph Smith suggests to Matty that the planet is no good for colonizing—not for a sensible reason, like how suddenly introducing a thousand alien lifeforms to a lush and defenseless ecosystem would likely destroy it, but because the lack of incentive to work would result in the colonists devolving to savagery. Smith’s argument is simple, if draconian: that a struggle for survivle is necessary to maintain civilization. If the colonists don’t work then they’ll turn into pastoral commies or something. I know a few people who would have a word to say about what Smith posits here, but in the context of a queer allegory this is a very curious point. This become even more curious when we think about the gay rights movement as a movement of people and how it could be connected with other historical movements, such as (here it comes) the early days of Mormonism—although Smith strikes me more as a Brigham Young figure than the real Joseph Smith. Still, Robinson makes his point; he alludes rather heavily to the story being about the survival of a social movement and, more cleverly, how the individual can suffer when trying to support said movement.

Make no mistake, Matty is a tragic figure. As a child he’s stuck with having to choose between death and tyranny, and of course without being able to understand the implications of his future he picks the latter. From the time he chooses to be taken under Smith’s wing to the story’s climax he does not have, as far as we can tell, a single day of happiness; there may be fleeting moments, but no more. Even when nobody can hurt him anymore (so it seems) and he has accomplished his goal of saving as many people on the ship as possible, there’s a darkness that shrouds him. At the end, having served his purpose and after being ostracized by the colonists (with his consent, it turns out), Smith leaves the position of Predict to Matty. The colonists, Smith supposes, will no longer need a dictator with an iron fist but instead a philosopher-king. Smith gives Matty the equipment he uses to maintain his unnatural longevity: the equipment in question is a mysterious drug, complete with a needle. The story ends on a bleak note as Matty takes the drug and “pushe[s] the plunger home.” That the Predict is implied to be a drug addict is only the tip of the iceberg.

A Step Farther Out

The biggest problem I have with “The Oceans Are Wide” is its length, as I think it would’ve been stronger as either a novelette or a full novel; certainly there’s enough material here to supply a story that’s double the length. It also pains me to say this, as I’ve said before that I think science fiction often works best in the novella mode. Robinson probably wrote at the length he did (some 27,500 words) because he was still a fairly new writer and/or because he wrote with magazine publication in mind. “The Oceans Are Wide” is a thematically juicy affair that shows a somewhat rough but very promising talent, especially given that Robinson was one of the very few queer writers working in the field at the time. I have to say I was also impressed that I found this novella a bit disturbing, namely for its implications as an allegory, given its vintage. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s very much a work of old-timey SF that’s worth being brought back into print. I’ll be keeping an eye on Robinson from hereon.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Fair” by John Brunner

June 20th, 2023

(Cover by Terry Maloney. New Worlds, March 1956.)

Who Goes There?

This introductory section is gonna be a bit long, bear with me. If you’re one of the three people who follows my Things Beyond posts then you would’ve figured I was to review the first installment of John Brunner’s novel The Stone That Never Came Down today, and you’ll also notice that this is very much not that review. Plans change. I did try reading that novel, but truth be told I bounced off of it so hard before getting even halfway through the installment, not to mention I was running out of time (my schedule has been merciless as of late), that I decided to just drop the damn thing. I found the stuff I had read to be both irritating and nonsensical, not helped by the fact that I had just come off of rereading Stand on Zanzibar. For a bit I thought maybe I was just Brunner’d out for the moment, but I think it’s more that going from good Brunner to bad Brunner caused whiplash; so then I was left with a hole in my review schedule that needed filling.

I also considered covering short stories by a different author, but I wanted to be fair to Brunner, so instead I figured that instead of forcing myself to cover a lesser Brunner novel we would get two Brunner short stories that will hopefully show him in a better light; helps that I’ve also been meaning to read some of his short fiction. As such I issued an executive order and today we’ll be talking about a very early but very interesting Brunner story with “Fair,” while the second installment of The Stone That Never Came Down will be replaced with another Brunner short story that’s been on my radar, “The Totally Rich.” As someone who, in recent years, has taken more to short stories and novellas than novels, I consider this move a net positive! Other than that everything else should proceed as normal; just ignore what I’m gonna be saying in July’s Things Beyond post.

The question remains, though: Who is John ~~Galt~~ Brunner? Depending on who you ask he’s one of the largely unsung geniuses of old-timey SF, and at the same time one of the largest providers of third-rate crap. He wrote a lot of novels that are now forgotten and/or loathed, but he also wrote a handful of novels that are said to be some of the best of their era, the most famous of these being the Hugo-winning Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner started writing as a teenager and would not stop until his death, but his career trajectory was a bit tragic; he did not get along with fellow British writers, being more accustomed to the American SF market and even being confused for an American at times. (I recently talked with an actual SF scholar, and it was not until the middle of our discussion that they realized Brunner was an Englishman.) Brunner was all of 21 when “Fair” was published—the scary part being that he was already five years into his writing career, his first work being published when he was 16.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1956 issue of New Worlds, which is on the Archive. You may notice it was initially published under the pseudonym Keith Woodcott, but this was a very poorly kept secret. “Fair” has only been collected three times in English, and has not seen print since the ’80s. It was first collected in the Brunner collection No Future in It, then much later in the Ballantine collection The Best of John Brunner. I personally don’t consider The Best of John Brunner to be part of the Ballantine “Best of…” author series from the ’70s, given it was published much later and does not follow the design pattern of that series; this is one way of saying the cover for it is so bad that I consider it to be non-canon.

Enhancing Image

We start sort of in media res, and Brunner crammed a lot into these dozen pages. We follow Alec Jevons, “ex-test pilot, ex-serviceman, ex-child and ex-husband, ex-this and that, ex-practically everything.” Jevons is deep in middle age, probably in his fifties, and he’s certainly too old to be going to the Fair, a massive playground of the future; but he’s not here for the entertainment. Truth be told, it’s not clear why he’s here, even to himself. He came here knowing that not only is this a Fair but the first Fair constructed—even now the biggest and best of its kind. I would go into great detail as to what the Fair is like, but I’ll say that if you’ve played Final Fantasy VII and remember the Gold Saucer, it’s like that: a highly advanced pleasure park that hosts a variety of attractions, ideally for young people to get lost in, hence the Gold Saucer’s reputation as a time sink in that game.

There’s this cloud of fear hanging over Jevons as he enters the Fair, even though he must know he’s not in any immediate danger; rather the fear comes from the prospect of being outed as an old geezer and picked on by the youths. Context: this is obviously set in the future but not too far in the future, as the Cold War is still going on and there’s a strong whiff of post-war British slang among the nameless youths. Brunner, at this point, was far closer in age to the youngsters than to Jevons, and for most of the story you wouldn’t guess this was the case from how those youngsters are framed as devious and unknowable—and doomed. There doesn’t seem to be a war going on, but there’s the sense that there was a war not too long ago and, more importantly, that war could come again any day now. “A million people a night in this fair alone,” we’re told, a million people a night hiding “from the uncomfortable reality of silence and thought, from the danger of tomorrow, from the waiting death poised above them in the sky…”

Something to keep in mind is that Brunner came from a generation of Britons who were too young to see combat in World War II but old enough to remember Nazi bombers over British skies. While the future of “Fair” is too distant to be set shortly after World War II specifically, it still evokes a post-war England which saw a rise in juvenile deliquency and the shadow of a generation of dead and traumatized British men. When the Cold War began in the years immediately following World War II, you’d have children and teens who grew up in an environment where the possibility of sudden nuclear devastation was very real and very known. Jevons himself served his country but was dismissed due to his Russian heritage, something that he was apparently bullied for in his own youth. While Jevons fears the youngsters at the Fair he also pities them, with the insecure boys and their girlfriends, “tarts before they were twenty, but lost and empty and without a future since they were ten.” At one point Jevons gets hit on by a girl who is probably a third his age and it (rightly) unnerves him.

Let’s talk about style for a moment, because frankly it’s not something I dwell on in these reviews and I think this is a good example of style contributing positively to the substance of the writing. Brunner could’ve easily deployed a “function only” style that got the job done but didn’t stray far from beige, but he must’ve been listening to some records at the time becaue there’s a punchiness and a musicality with how he interweaves the third-person narration with Jevons’s internal monologue, such that it’s not always clear who is saying what. The result is that there’s a bit of confusion, yes, but also a sense of intimacy with how thought and action bleed into each other. Check out this early passage, wherein Jevons ponders his age and his generation’s role in the creation of the Fairs; see how we get two channels, first- and third-person voices, sharing the same space:

The Fair had been less elaborate in his young days. Watch it, Jevons! You’re starting to admit your age. (And why not? Because if you remember that you’ve been around that long, you admit that you were responsible—this was your doing, this mechanical time-destroying hurly-burly, this feverish seeking after temporary nirvana. This was your fault!).

Like I said, Brunner’s writing here is busy, even high-octane, but this was clearly a deliberate choice on his part.

It’s hard to figure out what Brunner likes, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what he doesn’t like. For instance, he clearly despises anything that serves to numb human consciousness, and he also hates the silly business that is capitalism; not to say that Brunner was what we would call a progressive figure, given his standoffish relationship with women, but at least he tried. When I went into this I expected the Fair to be a nightmarish setting, and for most of the story my expectations were supported. The escalator system that gets more intense as you venture closer to the center of the Fair evokes a highway system from hell, and the security guards, dressed like court jesters and called “Uncles,” are not the kind you’d wanna run into if you’re scared of clowns. Yet Brunner does something in the climax that, while I don’t think it was perfectly executed, made me second-guess the story’s intentions. There’s not a lot to spoil since this is a story heavy on mood (with jazzy parenthetical asides that would not look out of place in a much later Brunner tale) and world-building rather than plot, but let’s get to it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The twist is video games. Well, it’s not just that.

Given this was written in 1955, Brunner would’ve had no conception of video games; the phrase would not’ve been part of his vocabulary. Even so, the climax of the story, in which Jevons partakes in several “totsensid” sessions, perfectly reads a highly advanced virtual reality program. “Total sensory identification was what they called it.” Total sensory identification. Identification with what or with whom? With people who are not what you’d call the average Briton, it turns out. First a pilot, which aligns with Jevons’s own experiences enough, but then he becomes one half of a newly married African couple, then later—and this really hits him—one half of a Russian couple. There’s some wish-fulfillment at play, as a sort of necessary evil, but you have these white British youths being thrown into the shoes of non-British non-white people, as a sort of empathy exercise.

The Fair is not just there to entertain, or even to push people’s senses to their limits—it’s there also to try to save the current generation of young people. A switch gets flipped in Jevons’s mind and he has the epiphany that these people are being subliminally trained, in what we would now call VR, to empathize with humans from other countries and cultures. I know people meme about Brunner for his capacity to “predict the future” (a stupid sentiment, to be sure), but I’m still taken aback that in 1955 (when he would’ve written “Fair”) he envisioned the potential of video games as a force for good in people’s lives. The thing is, games (video and otherwise) are always to some degree interactive, which is what makes them different from other mediums. We’re not given much insight into how interactive the totsensid is, but from what we’re told it’s like having your consciousness transferred to another body. Even the purposely unpleasant simulations, like being a Malay diver who’s dying of illness, have their value in how they bend one’s consciousness. “It was not pleasant, but it was real.” It’s enough to convince Jevons to start working at the Fair himself, in what has to be one of the few happy endings for a Brunner story.

I can’t say I’m entirely convinced of the ending’s sincerity, but it did take the story in a direction I very much did not expect. Brunner goes to such lengths to frame the Fair as a hellish place, only to subvert this at the end, that maybe it would’ve come as too much of a shock no matter how delivered. What’s important is that it gave me something to think about. I also feel like I shouldn’t have to say this, but Brunner not only anticipated cyberpunk by a quarter-century but also subverted one of the pet tropes of that subgenre, namely the notion that intimacy with technology via virtual reality or cybernetics would dehumanize people. Samuel R. Delany posited something not too dissimilar in his novel Nova, wherein most people are able to plug in directly to machinery via implants, with the result being that these people are actually more content with their labor than us due to being physically connected with their work. Technology, created with compassion in mind, could save the world. That Brunner put thought into this when he would’ve been barely out of his teens is impressive.

A Step Farther Out

Brunner surprised me with this one, even having heard good things about it in advance. I would’ve expected something more amateurish, given his age, but he already had a good amount of experience under his belt and there’s a spry youthfulness to the style that almost feels like it could fit in with New Wave writings of a decade later. “Fair” is, however, distinctly a Cold War-era story, written at a time when both sides were doing hydrogen bomb tests and when Germany and Berlin had been recently divided. I don’t think this story would’ve made quite as much sense had it indeed been published a decade later, and I’m also not sure if an older (and presumably more jaded) Brunner would’ve believed enough in the happy ending to go with it. “Fair” is a near-masterpiece in miniature that sees one of SF’s mavericks at a very early stage, just experienced enough to know about sentence construction and young enough to throw caution to the wind. This may be setting too high a bar, but it does give me hope for future Brunner readings.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Wings of a Bat” by Pauline Ashwell

June 17th, 2023

(Cover by John Schoenherr. Analog, May 1966.)

Who Goes There?

Two stories in (today’s pick being the second) and I’m pretty sure I’m a Pauline Ashwell convert. Ashwell debuted in 1958 with two SF stories, one under her own name and the other under the Paul Ash pseudonym (I’m not sure if anyone was bamboozled by this), getting two Hugo nominations the following year—the first for her emaculate novella “Unwillingly to School” and the second for Best New Author (went to No Award, although Brian Aldiss came close). She was one of the first female authors to get Hugo-nominated in any of the fiction categories, but despite this and the quality of her work she remains depressingly obscure; it probably doesn’t help that she wrote exclusively for Astounding and later Analog. Many of Ashwell’s short stories (admittedly there aren’t too many of them) have never been reprinted, and according to a certain insider friend of mine her estate has been basically impossible to get in touch with. Surely an Ashwell rediscovery would be possible if it was easier to reprint her work.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is not on the Archive but which can be found on Luminist. It was soon reprinted in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1967 (ed. Terry Carr and Donald Wolheim), and later anthologized in the dinosaur-themed collections Behold the Mighty Dinosaur (ed. David Jablonski) and The Science Fictional Dinosaur (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Robert Silverberg, and Charles G. Waugh). This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but these are all out of print. The messed up part is that “The Wings of a Bat” might be Ashwell’s most reprinted story, given that the competition is not stiff.

Enhancing Image

We’re down for our second dinosaur story this month, although it’d be more accurate to call it dinosaur-adjacent since pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. I was surprised to find that at no point (to my recollection) does the narrator of the story call the Pteranodon at its center a dinosaur, since that would’ve been (and still is) a common mistake to make. Consider, for one, how a dromaeosaur (or raptor) has more in common with a chicken than a pterosaur, the latter being a flying reptile and an evolutionary dead end. We don’t actually see any dinosaurs in the story itself, although they do get mentioned, making this a tenuous piece of dinosaur media. We get a couple mentions of certain prehistoric animals too, but thankfully Ashwell does not go deep into details, lest the story age woefully.

Where are we? More importantly, when are we? It’s the Cretaceous, and we follow a team of colonists in a mining camp—not mining the land but the waters of the island. The narrator (whose name I don’t think we get) is on paper a doctor assigned to the camp but who in practice spends much more of his time working on the camp’s newspaper—with a readership of less than thirty people. Doc (as I’ll call him from now on) is, like everyone else on the island, very short (the tallest person is 5’7″, as company-mandated), and does not have a soft spot for local wildlife. The location? Lake Possible, a sort of Loch Ness where prehistoric life really had taken over, although curiously, like I said, we do not encounter any dinosaurs directly.

Indeed, unlike most dinosaur media involving humans, the campers are not so concerned with being hunted by predators, but instead focus on their work and try to get along with each other. Conflict in introduced when Henry, a very young co-worker of Doc’s, brings in a wounded baby pterosaur, much to Doc’s distress; for one he’s a people doctor and not a veterinarian, but he also holds a grudge against pterosaurs. “I maintain that my attitude was not unreasonable, or even unkind. I knew no more about the treatment of sick pterodactyls than Henry did—if anything, less.” Had Doc been a veterinarian he might’ve written the pterosaur off as a losst cause, but with a combination of hope and ignorance he takes the fledgling in, first getting her (for it’s identifiably a her I suppose) to eat—not very successfully. This is where the pterosaurs-are-just-scaly-birds things comes into play, with truth be told is the only thing that struck me as overtly anachronistic; mind you, I say this ias an enthusiastic layman and not an expert.

We know now that pterosaurs and birds, while they were contemporaneous and to some degree related to dinosaurs (the birds being directly related to theropods), did not have a lot in common. Fiona, as the baby Pteranodon comes to be called, proves to be resourceful, but the thrust of the narrative is essentially one where a human nurses a baby bird back to health; in reality a baby Pteranodon would’ve probably been even more independent, being able to fly and fend for itself at a very young age. As it is much of the story is concerned with Doc and company working out a way to feed Fiona and later getting her to use her wings. There’s a certain saying that it takes a village to raise a child, and that’s basically true with raising Fiona, which turns out to be a multi-person endeavor. Still, Doc got the ball rolling.

You may wonder why, feeling as I did, I allowed myself to get stuck with the brute. The explanation, though complicated, can be given in one word: Morale. It’s a tricky thing in any community. When twenty-nine people make up the total population of the world and will for the next nine years, it’s the most important thing of all.

Of course the unspoken other reason for Doc agreeing to take care of Fiona is that he’s becoming slowly fond of her, but thankfully the narration does not push this to the forefront. I know that I’m describing “The Wings of a Bat” in such a way that one could think of it as a sappy yarn about some grumpy guy who learns that children are cool and yadda yadda, but trust me, this could be so much sappier. It works, I think, primarily because Doc, for all his capacity to do good, is not a sentimental person; like a lot of real doctors he cares about the lives of others but is not what we’d call an empath. Leonard McCoy he is not quite. Despite the lack of sentimentalism, the momentum of the narration is impressive, with Ashwell taking a bit after fellow British author Eric Frank Russell in that she conveys an energy that could be mistaken for American brashness.

“The Wings of a Bat” is billed as a novelette, but it reads as shorter because Ashwell deals out information at an almost perfect pace—I say “almost” because she does faulter slightly in the last quarter or so, when she apparently felt obligated to inject some “action” into the narrative. This is a story that starts stronger than it ends, but it maintains a youthful lust for the wonders of life that border on cinematic. Not that this would ever happen, but I can imagine a live-action movie adaptation (maybe a short film) that uses mainly puppetry and animatronics to bring Fiona to life—or, as an alternative, motion capture wherein a person, mimicking what might’ve been a pterosaur’s movements on land, is CG’d over. Even something on this humble a scale can charge the imagination in such a way.

There Be Spoilers Here

Unfortunately and without warning, Fiona does leave the nest, so to speak. More importantly, there comes the possibility of a storm—even a hurricane—that could put the whole mining expedition in jeopardy. The camp’s meteorologist falls ill, and somebody has to head out and get her weather readings for her. (We can send people back a hundred million years but evidently our weather machinery can only be so advanced.) Why Doc of all people has to be the one do this is a little arbitrary, but then without it we wouldn’t have an “explosive” climax—although we didn’t need one, this being my only real issue with the story. During his expedition Doc comes across a rather nosey Pteranodon, which of course is supposed to be Fiona but which Doc is unsure about. “This creature was about twice as large as she’d been when I loosed her. Would Fiona be full grown now? I hadn’t the slightest idea.” Oh I think you do, Doc! Henry supposes that Fiona, now grown up, either thinks herself as like a human or thinks of her human foster family as like pterosaurs. Ultimately Doc accepts the reunion.

The ending is a bittersweet one. We never see Fiona again, and her fate is left uncertain; but the camp is left mostly intact and Doc himself was apparently shielded by the now-grown Pteranodon during the storm. The newspaper Doc runs changes its name to include pterosaur-watching. Well that’s sweet. It took me two and a half days to read this one, which normally sounds bad, but in the case of “The Wings of a Bat” my schedule was cluttered and the time I had to read the story I wanted to savor. The last quarter of it is the weakest part (though the ending itself is nice), but it’s still well-paced enough that I didn’t feel my time was being wasted. What I liked so much about “Unwillingly to School,” namely its punchiness and eagerness to suck the reader into a place and particular character’s mindset (never mind that said character has a disability and she does not constantly hate herself for it), is shown here as well. Doc himself is implied to live with dwarfism, and he very much strikes me as (in the hypothetical movie adaptation) being played by Peter Dinklage. By story’s end I feel like I got live on Lake Possible and its environs, despite sparce descriptions of the wildlife and most of the campers being unnamed. Ashwell has the magic touch.

A Step Farther Out

Did not age as much as I had expected; granted, this is partly due to the aforementioned lack of details given about life in the Cretaceous. Ashwell’s style is also about as spritely and youthful as I had expected, despite her being deep in her thirties at this point and writing for the most conservative magazine in the field. I think people act disappointed with Analog in the last years of John W. Campbell’s editorship because he was still capable of backing strong material, and “The Wings of a Bat” is one example. I can see how one’s interest would wane a bit in the last section, once the “action” kicks in and the doctor’s relationship with the other campers and Fiona takes sort of a back seat, but it’s still short enough that my attention span was not tested. This is, despite the prospect of a cute baby pterodactyl, not the excercise in sentimentality I might’ve assumed. Hell, I can see this working as a movie. Just remember that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs!

See you next time.
The Observatory: Jurassic Park and the Promise of Science Fiction

June 15th, 2023

(From Jurassic Park, 1993.)

Contains spoilers for a movie that is not only three decades old but one of the most famous movies of all time.

I’ve written about Jurassic Park before, which funnily enough makes it hard for me to figure out how to start this month’s editorial. Choosing the topic was also easy, considering the film’s 30th anniversary was this month, but I also kept searching for some excuse to not write about it; again, it would not be my first rodeo. This is how it is with your first love—with the thing that’s been more or less consistently a part of your makeup since the days when you still believed Santa Claus was real. Only a few works of art can lay claim to influencing how you would perceive other works of art for the rest of your life, and while these don’t necessarily come along in your formative years, being very young certainly helps. I’m pretty sure I saw Jurassic Park for the first time when I was all of three years old and since then I’ve watched it at least once a year. Hell, I saw it twice in theaters (once in 2D and once in 3D) during its 20th anniversary theatrical rerelease.

2013 is already a long time ago.

I don’t talk about movies much here, because this is mainly a literature blog, but I’ve seen a lot of movies (you can see this for yourself on my Letterboxd page); with that said, I still feel weird when I tell people Jurassic Park is my favorite movie. People tend to be very defensive and nostalgic about their favorite movies unless they’re the type to succumb to recency bias. (I know you love Everything Everywhere All at Once, but you should probably let that opinion sit and marinate for a while before telling people it’s your favorite movie ever.) I know people who will swear by movies that I personally don’t care for, but it’s hard (not to mention wrong) to knock passion for a work of art. I know people whose brain chemistry was changed irreversibly when they watched The Matrix for the first time back in 1999, and I know from experience that Jurassic Park had a similar effect on people. No movie in history has inspired more people to become paleontologists than this one. Despite its technophobia (which I’ll get to in a minute), Jurassic Park is about as convincing an argument for the wonders of science as any book written by the likes of Stephen Hawking or Carl Sagan.

This is, of course, a movie that was primarily made to entertain people; it was based on a commercial SF novel in the “technothriller” mode by one Michael Crichton, whose influence on people’s understanding of SF is actually quite understated despite his popularity. Even though Crichton has now been dead for 15 years his ghost continues to haunt even supposedly cerebral SF now being produced, with the much lawded (though, having seen the first season, I was less impressed) show Westworld sharing the basic premise with Crichton’s movie of the same name. Crichton’s first (and arguably best) SF novel, The Andromeda Strain, still serves as a textbook and often-cited example of the theme of man’s folly in the face of nature. Jurassic Park, the novel, reads in parts like a direct line to Crichton’s thoughts on the prospect of humanity fucking around and finding out with regards to meddling with the natural world. Crichton’s avatar, Ian Malcolm, is not a doctor like his creator, nor is he a giant (he is also, unlike both Crichton and his movie counterpart, losing his hair), but he does serve pretty blatantly as a puppet through which Crichton hares his ambivalence about genetic engineering. The cautionary tale is not an ambiguous one.

The novel, published in 1990, was optioned for a movie adaptation before it even saw release, and Steven Spielberg hopped right on it. Spielberg has been, for about half a century now, the biggest architect of people’s cinematic imaginings whose name is not George Lucas, and like Lucas his fondness for science fiction is unmistakable. He did not officially direct an SF movie until Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, but Spielberg’s career from the outset was informed by genre maestros, not least of these being Rod Serling, whose Night Gallery a very young Spielberg worked on, and Richard Matheson, who wrote the screenplay (not to mention the short story) for Duel, Spielberg’s directorial debut. At first glance Crichton and Spielberg seem like they would make an odd couple, given the former’s pessimism and the latter’s notorious optimism, but they’re both undoubtedly gifted entertainers and they both see science fiction as a means to that end. A collaboration between the two was almost inevitable.

For Jurassic Park the film, Crichton co-wrote the screenplay with David Koepp, although from what I can tell Koepp did most of the heavy lifting in turning Crichton’s rather gory novel into a family-friendly script. Koepp, when he was on the ball, had an almost supernatural talent for writing blockbuster scripts that were just intelligent enough while being perfectly structured so as to keep audiences engaged. (Forgive me for using the past tense as if Koepp were dead when in reality he is very much alive, if over the hill.) This may sound controversial, but I think Jurassic Park is one of those film adaptations that largely improves on the source material (with a few concessions made), such that it holds up better overall. I still have a deep fondness for the novel, though I would say The Andromeda Strain and Sphere come closer to being Crichton’s best; it’s more that the novel is weighed down by copious amounts of exposition, along with Malcolm being the type to preach endlessly. Malcolm, on top of being blessed with an all-timer performance by Jeff Goldblum, is made less preachy and abrasive (if also not as clear in regards to his plot relevance) for the film.

The film was shot in the summer of 1992 and finished filming ahead of schedule, despite some issues with the effects. Spielberg originally envisioned the dinosaurs as being animated via stop-motion, but they could not get the dinosaurs to look “realistic” no matter how fluidly animated. Ultimately the stop-motion effects would serve as a useful blueprint for what would turn out to be mostly a mix of puppetry and animatronics, with some computer-generated effects sprinkled in when nothing else would do. The film would be (and still is) remembered as revolutionizing CGI, but the truth is that CGI played a very small part in the final product. The dinosaurs themselves only have something like just under 20 minutes of screentime, a good portion of which is devoted to the T. rex breakout scene, and only a small fraction of that time involves computer effects. The most impressive effect is arguably the fully constructed T. rex animatronic, which can be seen at certain points and which is seamlessly intermingled with CG shots.

More important than seeing dinosaurs, however, is the idea of seeing dinosaurs, and this is where the real magic of Jurassic Park comes into play. Surely this film would not have won three Oscars (plus a Hugo for Best Dramatic Pressentation) and kicked off a perpetually lucrative franchise had it been a two-hour snoozefest with the occasional dinosaur jumping out of a closet. Despite the relatively sparse dino action, the film remains consistently provocative and entertaining. While some critics faulted it upon release for its lack of human drama, the human characters are certainly memorable in their own right, with some of the finest character actors in the industry at the time being recruited: Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Samuel L. Jackson, Wayne Knight, Laura Dern, and the criminally underrated Sam Neill, among others. There is a genuine sense of awe when the visitors see a brachiosaurus for the first time—not just because the effects are convincing but also because the actors seem as star-struck as the audience. Ignoring the scientific inaccuracies (we know, for instance, that brachiosaurs did not have teeth), this was the first time moviegoers saw a sauropod that looked and acted like it could be the real thing.

There’s a certain long-running phrase in SF circles that, despite being around for decades and regarded by many as a cliche, has yet to have its stock value plummet: I’m of course talking about “sense of wonder.” SF as a genre can be said to have a special advantage over other genres in that it cranks out more “sense of wonder” moments than any other by far: the stargate in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the giant alien corpse with its chest opened in Alien, Neo dodging slow-motion bullets in The Matrix, the color palette changing as Our Heroess™ enter the Zone in Stalker. Those are just some movie examples, by the way. What exactly is sense of wonder? It seems impossible to quantify, which is probably true, and as such it’s hard to come up with a clean definition, although people know it when they see it. I think of sense of wonder as this: the sensation of opening a door to somewhere you’ve never been before. There is the sense, possibly a mix of joy and anxiety, of sailing into uncharted waters. Science fiction is my favorite genre in part because it’s the most wondrous genre; sense of wonder is its trade.

A work of science fiction need not be a masterpiece to have a great sense-of-wonder moment, since these are ultimately moments and not necessarily indicative of the whole picture, but it’s telling of Jurassic Park‘s magic that it has not one but several of these moments. The visitors seeing their first brachiosaurus is one example, as is (in a darker hue) the T. rex breaking out of its enclosure; then there’s the realization that, due to an oversight with what species of frog is being spliced with dinosaur DNA to fill the sequence gaps, the dinosaurs are actually transsexual and able to reproduce on their own. (That’s right, the movie said trans dinosaur rights.) In the book there’s a sense of foreboding with how the park has totally lost control of the thread, but in the movie this is somewhat replaced by a sense of amazement. Life had found a way, even against human-imposed limitationss. Ultimately it’s still a “man fucks around with nature and finds out” narrative, but Crichton’s pessimism has been downplayed in favor of wonderment at the possibilities of the natural world—to the movie’s benefit.

You could say that’s the promise of science fiction: the possibility of doors to things never seen before being opened. For any SF fan there comes a point, probably early in life, when some work of the genre just so happens to come along and make the promise that this is what science fiction is about and this is what science fiction is capable of doing. The work in question need not be of Shakespearean complexity, nor so involved in the depths of the human spirit, but it does offer an example of something that science fiction does more so than its brethren. I’m sure if you went back to the early 20th century you could find people who were inspired to persue some career path or to take up some social justice cause, or to even become SF writers themselves, because they read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine when they were kids. God knows I became first enamored with SF as a genre of literature when I read Wells and Crichton in middle school, then later Philip K. Dick. But when I was a kid a certain door had been opened to me, with a certain movie promising me that this is what science fiction can do.

The promise is still being kept.
Serial Review: Sos the Rope by Piers Anthony (Part 3/3)

June 13th, 2023

(Cover by Chesley Bonestell. F&SF, September 1968.)

Who Goes There?

Maybe Piers Anthony hits the spot if you’re really horny and/or are not a very discerning reader; in other words, if you’re in your teens. I am very much not in my teens anymore (although some of my peers would say 27 is still babby) so Anthony’s writing just kind of osculates between boring and repulsive for me. I hear Macroscope is supposed to be good but that’s one novel from an author who has, over the course of six decades, written dozens—many of them series entries. Speaking of which, Sos the Rope is the first entry in the Battle Circle trilogy, and having just finished the last installment I can see how it would lend itself to a sequel—not that I wanna read more. I was awfully slow finishing this, not because it was a difficult read exactly but because I didn’t like it and I kept putting it off.

Placing Coordinates

Part 3 was published in the September 1968 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can find used copies of the Battle Circle trilogy as an omnibus if you feel like it.

Enhancing Image

First things first, I cannot tell if there was a printing error in Part 2 or if Anthony somehow forgot to write a whole scene, but the recap section of Part 3 tells us about something that we are straight-up not told about in the previous installment. Last time, you may recall, Sos and Sol enter the battle circle to see who gets Sola and Soli, Sol’s wife and daughter (by way of adoption) respectively, and that is where it ended. We were not told the outcome of the fight at the end of Part 2 (indeed it ended just as the fight was about to start), but before we get to Part 3 proper we’re told that Sos had lost his fight with Sol. I was greatly confused becausse it made me think that I had somehow forgotten what had happened at the end of Part 2, but no, I did not miss anything; we’re just told about a scene in the recap that we did not get to read for ourselves. This is clearly bullshit.

Anyway, Sos lost the fight OFFSCREEN and now, in shame, he goes to “the mountain” to commit ritual suicide. I feel for him. His pet bird Stupid (still not funny) stays with him out of loyalty and sadly freezes to death as they climb the mountain, although Sos himself ultimately just loses consciousness before being rescued. It’s here that we’re introduced to the ssecond major female character of the novel and yet another reminder that Anthony cannot write about women for shit. I’m calling her Sosa now as opposed to later for the sake of my sanity, because you guessed it, she does not have a name at first. Sosa is a very short but very athletic woman who challenges Sos to be his wife, stealing his bracelet and making him work for it. I have nothing against short girls, but I have a creeping suspicion of what Anthony is trying when he repeatedly describes her as childlike and “Elfin,” and I don’t like it. I don’t like fanservice when it’s this creepy and manipulative.

Gonna go on two rants for the price of one here. The first is that I still can’t get over how fucking stupid the naming convention in this novel is. Women do not have names unless they have a husband, whereupon they take the husband’s name, just slightly altered. Is it patriarchal that the custom for marriage in Anglosphere involves the woman taking the man’s last name? Yes, but at last the woman had a name of her own to begin with. How would anything get done in the world of the novel if half the adult population is nameless and presumably unable to own or transfer property? We are told, of course, that things aren’t the same everywhere—that, for instance, things in South America are apparently not as dire; with that said, we’re given such a dim picture of life in this post-nuclear future that it actually strains one’s suspension of disbelief. I know the idea is that “the Blast” sent mankind (at least in North America) back to the stone age, with only small pockets of civilized humanity left, but women were able to carry titles even in the time of Richard III. This future society is untenable, which seems to be the point somewhat, but it’s also utterly implausible.

The other thing is that even if we’re to put the mechanics of the novel’s world aside, Anthony’s third-person narration cannot help but exhibit a profound distrust of women that goes beyond world-building. I sometimes wonder if I’m too easy on misogynistic writing in old-timey SFF, or if young readers are too harsh about such a matter; it’s fine, everyone has a different threshold. With that said, Anthony crosses my threshold repeatedly, to the point where I’m not sure what a defense of it is supposed to sound like. Early on Sos ponders what would’ve happened had that bitch Sola not entered the picture and complicated his totally platonic relationship with Sol, not even Sola in particular but the idea that a woman ruined everything. “It was not the particular girl that mattered, but her presence at the inception.” I wonder if people who complain about Robert Heinlein’s sexism (which is certainly valid to criticize, mind you) would survive if they encountered Anthony. I personally can’t stand this shit; I think it’s grotesque.

Anyway, we’re at the “hero’s lowest point” part of the narrative and so Sos, now weaponless (oh right, he gave up the rope as the result of losing his fight with Sol, ALSO SOMETHING WE WERE NOT TOLD ABOUT UNTIL AFTER THE FACT), has to regain confidence ~~by fucking the shit out of Sosa, now his wife~~ by getting to know the people of “the mountain,” which are not exactly crazies but who are considerably more civilized than the nomads who roam the wasteland. Sosa and others convince Sos he has to head back down the mountain, to “come back from the dead” as it were, and claim his spot as the true leader of Sol’s empire. Keep in mind that Part 3 is about twice the length of Part 2 and that despite the difference in length there’s about as much plot meat on the story’s bones; in other words there’s a lot of (bad) dialogue and not much real action here.

There Be Spoilers Here

Sos returns and meets up with some of his former homies, having done something I honestly would’ve expected to have seen earlier: go full barbarian class and adopt fists as his weapon in the battle circle. It’s a gamble, but after training Sos is really able to kick ass in the circle, gaining tribes and chipping away at Sol’s ground one battle at a time. Why Sos feels the need to do all this is not made clear, even to himself, which is something Anthony will probably elaborate on in the sequels but which I fortunately don’t have to get into. Sos’s biggest challenge once again is Bog, the big dumb club-swinger from before, who remains the best character simply by virtue of the fact that he likes hitting things and does not care about the big picture. Unfortunately their fight does not go how Sos had wanted and he ends up injuring Bog irreparably by breaking his neck accidentally. “If he survived it would be as a paralytic.” So Bog gets mercy killed.

Sos then narrowly beats Sol in their rematch, with Sol giving Sola over to Sos (as the two are still in love, God knows why) but keeping Soli. Father and daughter wander to the mountain where they may or may not be taking in by the people there. Sos thinks Sosa (whom he had left behind) will gladly accept Soli as an adopted daughter, but I have my doubts. Now if thousands of men at his disposal, both in name and in fact, Sos figuratively looks to the horizon and wonders if this empire of his will prove to save humanity or repeat the old mistakes—if he is “the hero, or the villain.” I mean clearly the villain here is Piers Anthony, but who am I to judge. The back end of Part 3 was a breezy read for me if only because the fight scenes kept going in one ear and out the other, as it were. It could just be that my deep ambivalence to the characters and nature of the novel’s world made the action uninteresting, but if I had a watch I would’ve been glancing at it.

A Step Farther Out

Can I go home now?

Thus far Sos the Rope is the worst thing I’ve reviewed for this site, narrowly beating out Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch-House” because of the length and because its woman-hating is so rabid. There are many bad serials out there, though, and covering one of those turkeys was inevitable. I went in hoping the experience would change my mind about Anthony and I have to say it really did not. For better or worse the next two entries in the Battle Circle trilogy did not see magazine publication, which means I don’t have an excuse to cover them here or to read them ever. Unfortunately, because Anthony did have a few other novels serialized early in his career, I’ll be at some point compelled (or rather coerced) to cover those…

See you next time.