Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

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.
Novella Review: “Time Safari” by David Drake

June 10th, 2023

(Cover artist uncredited. Destinies, August 1981.)

Who Goes There?

I don’t know much about David Drake, although if you browse enough of Baen Books you’ll find him a familiar name before long. Drake was one of the original Baen regulars, appearing in the ’70s when Jim Baen was editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, then later became a regular author and editor at Baen Books. As you can guess, Drake is a Vietnam war veteran (he was in the army, specifically) and this experience, like with certain other SF authors of his generation (looking at you, Joe Haldeman), very much informed his writing. Historically Drake is of fine importance as he was one of the pioneers of military SF as we now recognize it. “Time Safari,” while not military SF exactly, does evoke imagery from a certain war.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1981 issue of Destinies, which is on the Archive. You may notice a discrepancy: the people over at the Archive have it listed as the Spring 1981 issue. Truth is that this, the last issue of Destinies, is undated, but the people at ISFDB have it listed as August and, given that’s the month of publication inside the issue itself, I’m going with that; mind you, ISFDB classifies Destinies as an anthology series when really it’s a magazine that simply has an unusual format. Destinies was Baen’s first (and apparently most successful) attempt at a “paperback magazine,” a mass market paperback that has the contents of a magazine, including an editorial, a science department, a book review column, etc., and it even has issue numbers. Anyway, you can find “Time Safari” in the collection of the same name, as well as a few others, most recently the Drake collection Dinosaurs & a Dirigible; and yes, that last one is a Baen publication.

Enhancing Image

The cast of “Time Safari” is a bit crowded, so I’ll get names out of the way first before we get into the action. You basically have the safari staff and the tourists, with the important members of the former being Henry Vickers, Our Hero™, and Don Washman, a helicopter pilot; for the tourists we have the McPhersons, who are siblings and whose first names I don’t think we even get, and then the big ones, Jonathan and Adrienne Salmes, one of the bitterest married couples in all of fiction. The Salmes are a double-edged sword in that they’re more or less responsible for the plot (no Salmes, no story), but I also have issues with how Drake writes them. There’s a lot to say about some of these characters, good and bad.

The premise of “Time Safari” was not new, even in 1981; certain readers may recall L. Sprague de Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur” and Brian Aldiss’s “Poor Little Warrior!” from the ’50s, and there are probably examples from even earlier that I can’t think of right now. The idea of going back in time to hunt dinosaurs is basic, arguably problematic, and yet it’s a well that has been returned to again and again over the decades—I suspect because, while it doesn’t challenge the mind, it does lend itself to entertainment. The time travel project at the heart of “Time Safari” is backed by the Israeli government, and I can at least appreciate the move to make said government come off as a little shady. Totally unrelated, but I have to wonder if Vickers (who, mind you, is an American expat) would be as comfortable to work under ~~a more overtly fascist~~ Ben Netanyahu.

Vickers himself is a bit of an anti-hero. By his own admission he would’ve been trading ivory in darkest Africa had he lived in the 19th century, and surely the phantom of imperialism goes a way to explain his contentment to deal with whiny upper-class customers in the jungles of the Cretaceous. Of course, basically working in customer service myself, I’m inclined to sympathize with Vickers despite some rather questionable decisions he makes later in the story. Sad the same can’t be said for literally any other character. The McPhersons are fine I guess, but they’re a two-for-one deal and frankly it’s easy to get the two confused. The gunners (there are, if I remember right, two guides, two pilots, and two gunners on the staff) are mostly there to act as boisterous assholes, and the guides and pilots are there to act as Clement-esque figures of reason.

There’s a whole lot of explaining in this novella.

But then there are the Salmes. Jonathan is bad news for everybody pretty much every time he shows up, and he almost certainly suffers from some unnamed mental illness; his wife is not a whole lot better. Adrienne, who unlike her husband seems in total control of her mental faculties, gets the ball rolling by humiliating her husband in front of the whole safari group, being pretty open about the fact that she’s an adulterer. Now, I’m by no means one of those puritans who thinks adultery is a crime, but it’s more that Adrienne’s treatment of her husband is so obviously abusive that the fact that she never gets held accountable for this is a bit troubling. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but Adrienne is the closest the story has to a villain, although strangely Drake does not frame her as being thus.

I guess the more immediate problem is that Jonathan is a cuck with a screw loose who is both a coward and desperate to prove his wife wrong. “But Vickers was irritated to realize that it also bothered him that Don Washman and Mrs. Salmes seemed to be getting along very well together.” Maybe you can see where this is going. The interpersonal drama is the heart of “Time Safari,” which I guess makes sense since this is a 30,000-word novella and we can’t just have dinosaur-hunting action (although that does take up a good portion of the word count), but what holds me back from enjoying it more is that the characters are, by and large, both unlikable and unrelatable. No, I’m not saying every character in a work of fiction has to be a beacon of morality or that a character’s motives have to be totally understandable; it’s more that if you want readers to get invested in your love pentagon or whatever that they ought to get invested in the characters first.

A word on the mechanics of time travel as presented here. This is a case of being able to travel into the past but not into the future; there are no encounters with Eloi and Morlocks, sadly. The safari enters the Cretaceous via an insersion vehicle, a convoluted setup involving a helicopter for airborne shooting plus a couple of “ponies,” which are basically small tanks that can also serve as watercraft. Why the Cretaceous? My guess is that it was the period home to the biggest land carnivores the world has ever seen, plus sauropods in certain part of the world; and yes, we have a tyrannosaur. I say “tyrannosaur” because I don’t think we get a T. rex proper here, but rather a “gorgosaur,” a smaller cousin to the T. rex. Drake uses certain names for dinosaurs which probably referred to specific species circa 1980 but which now read as confusing, due to advances in our undertanding of dinosaurs. As is often the case with dinosaur media, carnivores (especially large theropods) are overrepresented, to the point where there seems to be a carnivore-herbivore imbalance. We have a few tyrannosaurs (which is more than I was expecting) but we also have a pack of “dromaeosaurs,” which we know to be raptors—although they’re not Velociraptors, of course.

Being that this piece of dinosaur media is now four decades old, be prepares for some rather gross inaccuracies. The interiors (the illustrator for “Time Safari” is sadly uncredited) give very much the impression of dinosaurs in the pre-Jurassic Park mode, i.e., as swamp creatures, with theropods being drawn as having upright statures as opposed to the far more practical horizontal orientation of the spine that would become mainstream with Jurassic Park. At the very least Drake does depict the tyrannosaur as a carnivore that would recognize, and probably get most of its nutrition from, carrion. We also get ceratopsians, although not the Triceratops specifically (it’s a Torosaurus if I remember right). We even get a prehistoric crocodile, which like everything else is fucking massive, althoughin terms of physiology it’s very similar to modern crocodiles; be sure to put a pin in this last one.

There Be Spoilers Here

Everything goes to shit when Jonathan Salmes sabotages the helicopter, upon discovering Adrienne’s affair with Washman, and later steals the insersion vehicle—at the cost of his own life. The back end of the story sees Vickers, Adrienne, and Washman separated from the rest of the team as they have to deal with a wrecked chopper, a pissed tyrannosaur, and a good deal of FIRE. Adrienne doesn’t find out about Jonathan’s death until later and it’s not even directly brought up in the short epilogue, which I thought was conspicuous. Vickers and Adrienne have to drag around an injured Washman as they get back to base, where along the way the two get into a weird and not totally convincing affair of their own—not helped by the fact that Washman is RIGHT THERE (albeit unconscious) the whole time. That Adrienne is a terrible person gives Vickers some pause but he relents on the grounds that, despite her bitchery, Adrienne is shockingly good at taking care of herself in the wild. I can’t say I buy Drake’s attempt at making Adrienne appear to be less of a shitty person than she really is.

We actually get two deus ex machinas for the price of one in the climax, as the tyrannosaur that’s been going after the trio gets fucking wrecked by a crocodile that nearly dwarfs it in size. (Well you know what they say, there’s always a bigger fish…) The second and slightly more ludicrous deus ex machina comes when the insersion vehicle gets returned to where it was before, despite Vickers being convinced that you can’t return exactly to the time and place where you last jumped off—something that was vaguely alluded to early in the story but which more feels like a rabbit that Drake has pulled out of a hat. By this point Vickers and Adrienne have taken a liking to each other; if I was in Vickers’s position I would decline, if only because Adrienne’s late husband met a very bad end and, truth be told, I get black widow vibes from her. Still, despite a couple deaths (which I feel like would involve a lot of red tape, but Drake bypasses this), the safari team is rescued and Vickers and Adrienne volunteer to be guinea pigs for the Israeli government’s time travel shenanigans—which I assume is what turns this into an episodic series, but I’m not sure.

A Step Farther Out

I’m curious about reading more Drake, but weirdly I’m not so curious about checking out more of this series in particular. True, the kid in me goes apeshit for anything dinosaur-related by default (even bad and/or woefully outdated dinosaur media), but “Time Safari” is not how I would’ve handled the material personally. If Drake had written his human characters with more empathy I think it would’ve improved the story considerably. If you want dinosaur-hunting action then chunks of the novella will scratch that itch, but it’s also lacking in that sense-of-wonder touch that defines so much of dinosaur media—I suspect intentionally, except that it doesn’t quite venture into the nihilism of, say, Aldiss’s “Poor Little Warrior!” Speaking of which, Aldiss’s story got its point across in half a dozen pages, whereas I do think Drake could’ve streamlined “Time Safari,” namely its cast of characters, and made it a shorter, punchier novella.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Sos the Rope by Piers Anthony (Part 2/3)

June 6th, 2023

(Cover by Gahan Wilson. F&SF, August 1968.)

Who Goes There?

To give Piers Anthony some credit, I’m sure he’s written something good, given he’s been writing continuously for about 60 years now; you know the thing about stopped clocks. With that said I can’t bring myself to read a great deal of Anthony. The last time (actually it was also the first time) I had read Anthony was his 1972 short story “In the Barn,” which was a few years ago and which put me off from reading more Anthony for that span of time. I hear Macroscope is supposed to be good…

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 was published in the August 1968 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I can’t tell if it’s in print or not, but used paperback copies are easy to find. For the morbidly curious, the whole trilogy (all three novels being mercifully short) can be found easily as an omnibus. Why someone would want this is beyond me.

Enhancing Image

As you know I didn’t like Part 1, but I’ll admit Part 2 is an improvement—partly because it’s much shorter. Not much happens and there’s not a lot for me to talk about, so this review will be just as succinct. Last time ~~on Dragon Ball Z~~ we had Sol enter the battle circle in an effort to recruit Bog, a big dumb brute who has impressive stamina and is real mean with the club. The match ends in a draw and Bog chooses to not join Sol’s tribe; he simply likes to fight people in the circle for the fun of it. Bog is dumber than a bag of hammers but he’s still the most relatable character in the novel. Sos will run into Bog much later (in the installment) after a time-skip and it’ll be the most enjoyable sequence in Part 2. Did I say “enjoyable”…?

Why yes, Part 2 is, surprisingly, not constant pain and suffering; this is due largely to the absence of Sola, who does not reappear until towards the end (regrettably but inevitably) of this installment. Indeed women are mostly absent from the narrative at this point, which is great because Anthony is about as good at writing women as John F. Kennedy was at staying faithful to his wife. The trio that defined Part 1 has dispersed, with Sos reaching the end of his one-year “contract” with Sol and splitting off from the tribe. To do what? Not really sure. He comes to a crazy-run hospital and has a chat with one Dr. Jones, who by all appearances is a normal modern-day doctor. We find out that Sol was an orphan and that he is in fact a eunuch, not that these fact change anything profoundly. It’s here that Sos also finally gets the bright idea to take on a new weapon, and you can guess what it is.

Sos, previously weaponless and bitchless, decides to adopt the rope as his new weapon; it’s not conventional but it functions similarly to the whip, which Dr. Jones points out as a viable offensive tool. “That day Sos gained a weapon—but it was five months before he felt proficient enough with it to undertake the trail again.” That’s right, we get another time-skip! The pacing in this installment is a little too fast if anything, to the point where I struggle to get invested in what’s happening; there’s so little time to get attached to characters and action. The speed at which Anthony pushes the plot forward reminds me, as someone who’s written fanfiction (don’t ask for what) in his time, of competent but underwritten adventure fanfiction you’d find on AO3. The wish-fulfillment element doesn’t help.

Dr. Jones brings up something I had thought of before but which the world of the novel seemingly did not have an answer for, which is the fact that even in the sword family there are many distinct types of sword that require different technique and levels of physicality. Someone who kicks ass with a broadsword may not be so effective with a rapier. Thus Sos uses this loophole to adopt such a niche tool as the rope for his new weapon. What if someone were to use a shield as their weapon of choice? Random thought. The shield is known mainly for defense but it could also serve as a gnarly weapon in a pinch, especially depending on the materials of the shield. I wanna be more interested in the mechanics of the novel’s world-building than I actually am, saying this as a bit of a Dark Souls fan. I’m just saying if combat is the focal point of your story, whether it be literature or a video game, you should put more thought and energy into making that compelling.

There Be Spoilers Here

Eventually Sos runs into Bog again and they have their own match, mainly to test Sos’s proficiency with his set of rope; it’s another draw! Then Bog watches cartoons on a TV set; this is the best part of the installment. Then we’re finally reunited with Sol and Sola… sort of. Sola had gotten pregnant with Sos’s kid at the end of Part 1, and well, it’s been over a year since that happened. It’s a baby girl and her name is Soli. Cute. One problem: even though Sol is perfectly fin with Sos taking Sola as his wife (he’s actually quite happy to get cucked like that), he wants to keep Soli. Admirable that Sol wants to raise a child as a single parents, and it’s not even technically his, but the question is: who does Soli belong to, her mom or her “legal” dad? I feel like this whole situation would be solved with polygamy, what with Sos and Sol respecting each other a great deal and certainly the three of them would agree to share. But oh well, we need drama…

What’s to become of the baby? Will Sos and Sol’s friendship end over this dilemma? Should we care? Stay tuned to find out!

A Step Farther Out

https://youtu.be/uqqUgG2PUL4

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Exit the Professor” by Henry Kuttner

June 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Earle Bergey. Thrilling Wonder, October 1947.)

Who Goes There?

Henry Kuttner is probably one of the more tragically undervalued writers from the so-called Golden Age of SF. He and his wife C. L. Moore were “co-winners” of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. The SF Encyclopedia calls him “a journeyman of genius.” He started in 1936 as a denizen of Weird Tales, as one of the younger members in the Lovecraft Circle, though his early horror seems to take more after Robert E. Howard than Lovecraft, and by the early 1940s he had matured into one of the funniest and most reliable writers contributing regularly to Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown. Kuttner’s years-long collaboration with Moore was so seamless and fruitful that a) people can only make educated guesses as to who wrote what, and b) Moore’s own immense talent would have the doubly tragic effect of undermining Kuttner’s own talent in historical accounts. Kuttner dying prematurely in 1958 (only a month apart from another comedian of the field, C. M. Kornbluth), before he could’ve possibly returned to writing (he was busy getting his Master’s degree) may have also contributed to modern recollections of him being rather foggy.

The reality is that Kuttner’s razor-sharp wit and pessimistic sense of humor, plus a social awareness uncommon in his peers at the time, made him a major precursor to certain SF writerss in the generation following him, including Robert Sheckley, William Tenn, and yes, a mature C. M. Kornbluth. He even had a massive influence on Ray Bradbury, even though the two writers have little in common in terms of worldview. Kuttner, who submitted to every publication under the sun, serves as an unintentional landmark in that his death coincided with a profound shrinking of the SFF magazine market towards the end of the ’50s. He continues to be missed.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1947 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, which is on the Archive. “Exit the Professsor” is listed on ISFDB as a collaboration with Moore, but frankly I find this hard to believe; it was initially published under Kuttner’s name alone, was collected in Kuttner-specific collections (including Ballantine’s The Best of Henry Kuttner), but more importantly, it reads like a Kuttner story from start to finish. Anyway, if you want reprints then go for the aforementioned Ballantine volume (I wanna start collecting those at some point, they’re very collectable) and the most essential volume of them all, Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Has been anthologized weirdly little.

Enhancing Image

I hope you like eccentric families, because we’ve got one for the ages here. The Hogbens are what you might imagine to be a stereotypical Appalachian (my girlfriend, a Kentucky native, informs me it’s pronounced App-uh-lach-an) family, the Hogbens, who are very redneck-y… only there’s something weird about all of them. We’ve got Saunk, our narrator, the eldest child of the family; Little Sam, the baby of the group, who has two heads and is supposed to be to telepathic; Paw, the dad, who, either because he chooses to or because he doesn’t know how to turn back, is always invisible; Maw, the mom, who… I actually don’t remember what’s weird about her; Uncle Les, who’s able to FLY on command; and Grandpaw, who speaks pseudo-Shakespearean and who is old enough to have known Roger Bacon—making him at least 700 years old. So yeah, they’re mutants.

The story kicks into gear because the Hogbens have a strange contraption, a “shotgun-gadget” that actually kills a few member of a rival family, though by the Hogbens’ own admission they don’t know how the dingus works. The family has been making a ruckess with this contraption and with people alleging strange things coming from that area, so it’s only a matter of time before a scientist gets involved: Galbraith, the titular professor. As Galbraith explains, “Our foundation is studying eugenics, and we’ve got some reports about you. They sound unbelievable.” When someone says they’re studying eugenics it’s usually a red flag; but Galbraith is here because the Hogbens are suspected (rightly) of being natural mutants, having sustained their genes for centuries now and having kept low-key by living in a rural area.

Given what I said before about Grandpaw it shouldn’t be surprising that the Hogbens’ legacy can be traced back very easily to the UK—hell, not just the UK but the British isles of the Middle Ages. One nitpick I do have is that while it makes sense to hide in a part of the world with few people if one is trying to hide one’s mustations, I’m not sure if rural Kentucky is the best choice. Anyway, Galbraith is curious and also devious enough that once he’s gotten hold of the Hogbens he all but holds them hostage, forcing one of them to either travel to New York with him to be studied or to have a science team come to their place. The Hogbens’ secret must be kept and Saunk is not above committing a little (more) murder, but Grandpaw says that there will be no more killing from this household—not that killing Galbraith would probably help the family in the long run.

What do, then?

Before I get to spoilers (there’s really not a lot to cover), I wanna talk about one thing that may prove a roadblock for some people reading this story, which is how Saunk is a redneck and that he’s the one narrating, which means the story’s action is conveyed with a pho-net-ick ack-sent, like an off-brand rendition of one of Faulkner’s more backwoods-y characters. It’s very readable, mind you; you get used to the accent quickly enough. There is, of course, the question of whether a diehard Californian like Kuttner will render a rural dialogue a) accurately, and b) with sensitivity: the answer to both is probably no. I would take more issue with this if “Exit the Professor” was a more serious story, but it’s not; it is quite mindfully a pure comedy that, had the science-fictional element been changed to fantasy, would’ve fit right at home in Unknown. Indeed it’s the story’s harking back to Kuttner’s comedic fantasies in Unknown that gives me a soft spot for it.

One last thing: there are a lot of great lines here. Saunk is a funny narrator, less because he’s trying to be funny and more because he happens to say funny things at times. When Galbraith sees the shotgun-gadget he pesters Saunk with questions, and, having little idea as to how the thing works, Saunk is very curt about it. “It puts holes in things,” he says at one point. What a lad. The brevity is what makes it funny.

There Be Spoilers Here

So they can’t kill Galbraith, lest they upset Grandpaw, and Saunk can’t go to New York for risk of exposing the family; so what now. Saunk is a bright boy, though, and he comes up with a scheme involving the shotgun-gadget. See, the shotgun-gadget doesn’t just put holes in things. Saunk uses the professor’s curiosity against him by having him mess with the dingus, aiming at a weather-cock “to be safe,” which actually results in a whole lot of toothaches in the village. “I guess half the people in town had gold fillings in their teeth.” There’s a town hall meeting, with people threatening to lynch the professor for his meddling with the shotgun-gadget, but of course, instead of helping the professor out of his problem, the hogbens decide to make it WORSE. This all reads like an epic prank gone wrong.

The dingus removes people’s gold fillings—and also false teeth. And glass eyes. And the chairs in the town hall. And people’s clothes. Kuttner seems of the belief that naked people in public are funny; a wise man he is. So you’ve got a bunch of naked hillbillies chasing after the professor wanting to tar and feather his ass, which leaves him only one option: the Hogbens. The solution the Hogbens have in mind is… a bit odd; don’t think we’re given a scientific explanation for it. Somehow they shrink the professor down to a very small size and keep him stuck in a bottle. “Sometimes we take out the bottle we keep him in and study him.” I can’t tell if this is supposed to be a ship-in-a-bottle scenario (which would be pretty cool, you have to admit) or if they just keep the professor in there and treat him like a doll. I like the climax but I’ll admit I’m not as big on the ending itself, which is abrupt.

Your mileage may vary depending on how much you enjoy snappy jokess in your SF and how much you can tolerate stereotypes for the sake of humor, but for what it’s worth I’d say the Hogbens come out pretty well.

A Step Farther Out

I specifically picked “Exit the Professor” as something that looks lightweight and entertaining before I continue to suffer through Sos the Rope, and that’s what I got! At the same time this shows Kuttner on his own (contrary to what ISFDB tells you) and on his best behavior, channeling some of the whacky humor he’d proven a master of in the early ’40s, with a somewhat plausible science-fictional premise to boot. Unless you’re Appalachian and are easily offended then the hijinks of the story should not offend. This is short and quite chuckle-worthy, to the point where I could just quote several little echanges that caught me off guard—though that wouldn’t help anyone. Of the Kuttner stories I’ve reviewed thus far this one is my favorite. It’s like comfort food: it’s not challenging but it makes you feel good.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: June 2023

June 1st, 2023
(Cover by Jeff Jones. Amazing Stories, October 1973.)

Ladies and gentlemen? I love monster movies. I know, it’s not very classy or literate to say so, but I love movies about monsters—big and small. I love Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, King Kong, Frankenstein’s monster, the blob, the werewolf, the creature from the black lagoon, the shape-shifting alien of John Carpenter’s The Thing, and of course the many creatures brought to life by Ray Harryhausen. Among those movie monsters are the dinosaurs and prehistoric reptiles which roamed the earth long before man came along—real-life monsters that were ultimately animals, trying to live their lives like the elephants and giraffes of today. Jurassic Park was probably the first monster movie I ever saw, and as such it was my first dose of what would turn out to be a lifelong addiction. Jurassic Park hit theaters in June 1993, and even now its effects, mostly practical contrary to its place as an innovator in CGI, are mostly seamless and dazzling.

Since now is the time of the film’s 30th anniversary, I figured it’s time to put a couple prehistoric-themed stories on the roster, a short story and novella which predate Jurassic Park but which hopefully will evoke a similar sense of wonder and amazement for Earth’s distant past. Aside from that we’ll be continuing a serial we had started last month, and we have a reliable workhorse in Henry Kuttner returning to the site once again. There is not a whole lot else to say, frankly—except for one thing.

As a young and earnest fan I was stoked to appear as a guest on my first SFF podcast, which actually was uploaded earlier today. I wanna thank Seth over at Hugos There Podcast for giving me the opportunity ~~to embarrass myself~~ to discuss a certain obscure and scoffed-at book that I would be unable to review for my own site. I believe I also mentioned a second podcast I’d be guesting on, which sadly was a bust, but depending on when it’ll be rescheduled (I’m really hoping it will be that and not simply trashed for good) it may be uploaded by the end of June.

Now it’s time for the stories!

For the serials:
1. Sos the Rope by Piers Anthony. Serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July to September 1968. I’m still stunned that we’re covering Piers Anthony—because of his reputation, but also because he was not much of a magazine contributor. Strange as it may sound, however, Anthony wrote much of his early fiction for the ‘zines, with his second novel, Sos the Rope, being written for a contest and first seeing print in F&SF. Anthony was already a Hugo nominee by then, though everyone I know loathes Chthon, the nominee in question.
2. The Stone That Never Came Down by John Brunner. Serialized in Amazing Stories, October to December 1973. Brunner was one of the most prolific SF writers of the era, in no small part because he wrote full-time and he had bills to pay. While he wrote a handful of classic novels, most famously Stand on Zanzibar, he seemingly wrote three times as many novels that were much shorter and less demanding than his major ones, The Stone That Never Came Down being one of those minor novels. I picked it because I liked the title.
For the novellas:
1. “Time Safari” by David Drake. From the August 1981 issue of Destinies. I’ve said this before, but for the purposes of my site I’m counting Destinies and its ilk as magazines; don’t @ me about this. All I really know about Drake is that he’s a Baen regular as author and editor, being one of many military SF authors to write for Jim Baen and later become a mainstay at Baen Books. “Time Safari” itself ia apparently part of a series, but given that these were published out of order I think it’s safe to assume this is functionally a standalone work.
2. “The Oceans Are Wide” by Frank M. Robinson. From the April 1954 issue of Science Stories. I know little about Robinson, but what I do know has my attention firmly held. Like a lot of SF authors of his generation Robinson got started around 1950, during the height of the SFF magazine boom, and wrote a good deal of his SF in the ’50s. More importantly, Robinson was one of the first unequivocally queer SF writers, even being associated with Harvey Milk and later being inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame.
For the short stories:
1. “Exit the Professor” by Henry Kuttner. From the October 1947 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. ISFDB lists this as a collaboration with C. L. Moore, but with all due respect I doubt that very much. Kuttner has the rare misfortune of being overshadowed by his equally (many would say more) talented wife, apparently to the point where Kuttner made jokes about Moore secretly writing stories attributed to him. True, he’s not as refined as Moore, but Kuttner’s humor and pessimism make him prescient, never mind that he was seriously prolific.
2. “The Wings of a Bat” by Pauline Ashwell. From the May 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction. Ashwell is an author I’ve discovered recently in large part thanks to the anthology Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963) and its related fanzine Galactic Journey. Sadly Ashwell did not write a lot; “The Wings of a Bat” would be her last story for 16 years. Equally peculiar is that she wrote exclusively for Astounding/Analog, being loyal to John W. Campbell and later Stanley Schmidt (for some reason). This one has pterosaurs I think…
Enjoy the serials while you can, because in July we’ll be going without them again. I have a certain idea in mind that may or may not pan out. Hopefully June will not see any dents in my schedule like last month.

Won’t you read with me?
Complete Novel Review: Big Planet by Jack Vance

May 31st, 2023

(Cover by Walter Popp. Startling Stories, September 1952.)

Who Goes There?

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a “complete” novel here, and unlike last time this one is actually complete. Today’s novel, Big Planet, is a rare case where the magazine version of the novel serves as the basis for the definitive text, as opposed to the first book publication. I’m not even sure what Jack Vance’s first novel would be. Wikipedia says Vance’s juvenile novel Vandals of the Void was his first, but this was published after the magazine versions of Big Planet, Slaves of the Klau (magazine version titled Planet of the Damned) and The Five Gold Bands; and then there’s The Dying Earth, which may or may not count as a novel (I personally don’t count it). Thing is, Vance wrote a lot, especially from the ’50s through the ’70s. If you read enough Vance you pick up on certain pet themes of his and certain quirks (we might say limitations) which can grate on one’s sensibilities. I like Vance because he’s convenient to mine for review material.

But Vance is arguably the most important American SFF writer of the 20th century that the fewest people have read; his most famous work, The Dying Earth, has fewer than 10,000 ratings on Goodreads as of this writing. To put this in perspective, The Shadow of the Torturer, the first part of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (ya know, that science-fantasy series nerds will tell you is criminally overlooked) has more than double the ratings. Wolfe fans ought to read Vance at some point, since the former clearly owes a debt to the latter; but this also applies to fans of tabletop RPGs, whose mechanics (particularly those of Dungeons & Dragons) take after Vance’s depiction of magic in the Dying Earth series. Especially for his fantasy, Vance has left a distinct mark on genre fiction in the latter half of the 20th century, although not many people are aware it’s his mark.

Big Planet is science fiction from start to end, though, and unlike The Dying Earth it did not inspire a future trend; rather, what makes Big Planet unique for its time is its dedication to mixing planetary adventure with scientific plausibility, with a strong dash of anthropology. This is a novel where the setting is the main character—that while we find out little to nothing about the human characters propelling the action, we do get many passages in which Vance fleshes out the many locales and societies on Big Planet (for that’s the planet’s name). Because this is a fairly episodic novel, without any real subplots, I won’t be doing a point-by-point rundown but instead will focus on the novel’s ambitions and flaws as an experiment—for it’s certainly an interesting novel, though not a perfect one.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1952 issue of Startling Stories, which is on the Archive. Whereas Startling Stories tended to publish borderline novellas and abridged or easly versions of full novels, Big Planet appears complete here at about 60,000 words, and for a quarter-century (according to Wikipedia) this would be the best version of the novel you could find. The first several paperback editions, including the Avon edition in 1957, were abridged in some way, so keep that in mind if you’re into collecting vintage editions. Nowaodays, though, you can find a complete and in-print version of Big Planet easily, with the Spatterlight Press paperback being your best bet. The Spatterlight Presss edition also comes with an enlightening introduction by Michael Moorcock as he admires both Vance and Big Planet while recognizing the novel’s unusual place in Vance’s oeuvre.

Enhancing Image

We start with a ship that’s heading for Big Planet, a ship containing a commission team from Earth who are supposed to get info on a certain rascal named Charley Lysidder and bring him to justice. Why? Because Lysidder is becoming the biggest warlord on Big Planet, which is a high benchmark because Big Planet is filled with warlords and slave traders. The commission team is headed by Glystra, who will be our protagonist (he doesn’t seem like it in the first couple pages, but watch out), followed by Cloyville, Bishop, Pianza, and some redshirts. We spend about a minute on the ship before everything goes to hell; there’s a spy aboard. The skipper and first mate get their throats cut and the ship crash lands on Big Planet, 40,000 miles from Earth Enclave, basically an embassy and the only safe space for Earthmen. “To land anywhere on Big Planet except Earth Enclave meant tragedy, debacle, cataclysm.” Never mind literally halfway around the world. It turns out that Big Planet bears its name for a good reason.

We get casualties before we’ve even landed on the planet and there are more once we do, including the ship’s stewards and a nun who did not have any lines up to this point and whose body is not even recovered. (Be sure to put a pin in that last part.) It’s bad enough that Glystra and the survivors landed on the other side of the planet, but also they have no means of getting to Earth Enclave in a timely fashion; a trip, assuming they make it, will take weeks. The reason for this is that not only is there no electricity for Big Planet tech, there’s very little metal—to such an extent that metal is measured by the ounce. Big Planet has a wide diameter (yeah, duh), but it manages to have about the same gravity as Earth by virtue of being very poor in metals. Indeed the locals who discover the crashed ship waste no time in tearing it apart for scraps as the materials alone would make them rich.

There are no spaceships or cars on Big Planet—also no birds, for some reason. You’ll have to hoof it, or find a wagon or some alternate means of transport that doesn’t require metal or electricity. This is all pretty near, by the way. Vance goes out of his way to explain why Big Planet is an Earth-like setting, complete with gravity that doesn’t crush the human characters, by explaining that in some ways it is like Earth—only it lacks metals. The energy weapons Glystra and others carry are valuable because they’re powerful and accurate (there’s something called an ion-shine, which I don’t even know what the fuck that’s supposed to look like so I just think of it as a raygun), but they can also be traded for precious resources and information if need be simply becausse of the rarity of the materials. Importing metal to Big Planet is illegal (or rather the Earth federation has enforced a metal embargo on Big Planet) probably so as to not upset the balance—hence one of the reasons why Glystra wants to take Lysidder to Earth authorities.

There’s one other thing: the people on Big Planet don’t fuck around. Glystra and his team will come across bandits, cannibals, despots, and if they’re really unlucky, Republicans. For both better and worse, Big Planet is a sandbox wherein damn near anything is possible so long as you don’t need 20th century technology (or shit, even 19th century technology) to achieve your goals. Any pre-industrial system of government would be possible here. We don’t read about socialist collective farms, but it’s not hard to imagine those existing—successfully—on Big Planet. The whole thing has a whiff of pastoralism about it, not so much in the Clifford D. Simak tradition but in how Vance seems to think that people, if left to their own devices, will gravitate towards feudalism or agrarianism. If you read enough Vance you’ll get the impression that he a) hates cities, and b) is consistently wary about organized religion, which is curious for classic SF.

Oh, one more thing…

The team gets a recruit in the form of Nancy, a Big Planet native who apparently has nothing better to do with her time than accompany a bunch of soldiers and bureaucrats on what amounts to a suicide mission. Nancy is not this woman’s proper name but for the sake of my sanity, and because every other character calls her Nancy henceforth, I’m calling her that. She’s the token woman of the group, which sounds… a bit dubious. I guess it’s better than nothing, but don’t go to Nancy looking for a layered character with a rich interior life, because she will only disappoint you. Then again, Glystra is the most developed character here and that’s by virtue of being the guy who gets to call the shots; if he was in the position of say, Corbus (the ship’s chief engineer, now Glystra’s right-hand man) or Bishop then we would find out basically nothing about him.

Nancy joining the team is inexplicable, and even Glystra can’t help but notice this—though it doesn’t occur to him that Nancy knows something he doesn’t. It could also be that Nancy is attractive and Glystra is too busy getting bricked up in the middle of the mission to think about how this may not be a random encounter for long. Get this:

Something was out of place. Would a girl choose such a precarious life from pure wanderlust? Of course. Big Planet was not Earth; human psychology was unpredictable. And yet—he searched her face, was it a personal matter? Infatuation? She colored.

Is he projecting? Is he dense? Maybe.

Going back through my notes, it’s striking me how many characters show up and how many of them I’ve already forgotten about. There are episodes early in the novel that aren’t exactly Shakespearean; this could be explained by the team being a little overcrowded at first, although it does get whittled down as the novel progresses. Who the hell is Darrot? I don’t remember anything him except that he was on the ship, and then he gets killed off unceremoniously, “his dead face turned up.” There are run-ins with bandits and a very odd scheme involving river monsters that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around, only being able to surmise that it involves locals being tricked into thinking that these beasts are carnivorous. We meet so many people in the first half of the novel that it almost becomes like a joke. “If [Glystra] set about righting the wrongs of everyone they met, they would never arrive at Earth Enclave.” I guess this is a price one has to pay with an episodic structure, because it’s like we’re on a riverboat at a theme park and we’re watching all the sights on the river’s edges but we’re not allowed to wallow in them.

Something I noticed about Big Planet that makes it stick out from most Vance I’ve read is that it lacks the affected language of Vance’s Dying Earth stories—indeed, much of his work in the ’60s onward. This is not merely the result of Big Planet being an early work, because The Dying Earth precedes it and that “””novel””” has some of the most purple prose you’ll find in American fantasy fiction. No, it’s more, I suspect, that Big Planet was written with magazine publication in mind; and yes this was still early in Vance’s career, before he had garnered a reputation as one of genre fiction’s most baroque practitioners. Vance’s tendency to adorn his prose with fancy vocabulary and have his characters in a rather mannered fashion, lacking verisimilitude, can turn some readers off, so those same people might find the straightforward (to the point of curtness at times) language of Big Planet to be refreshing; personally I don’t like or dislike it.

It’s here that we reach the cutoff point, though, because about halfway through the novel we get to the best part and Vance’s purest bit of invention for the novel. We’ve come across a few villages and groups of scoundrels up to this point, but we have not encountered a city—which is where Kirstendale comes in, for the precious few chapters we spend there.

There Be Spoilers Here

The team comes across a trolley service that makes travel a bit less painful, though it’s still no match for cars back on Earth. It’s here that we enter the most memorable location in the novel: the decadent city of Kirstendale. The midpoint and indeed much of the back end of the novel is concerned with Kirstendale, either as a setting or as a carrot on a string for Our Heroes™ since it represents the height of culture and luxury on Big Planet—which naturally means it has a few caveats. Compared to what has been dealt with up to now, though, Kirstendale is a paradise. “It was the largest and most elaborate settlement the Earthmen had seen on Big Planet, but it was never a city which might have existed on Earth.” It’s no wonder that Cloyville decides to stay behind in Kirstendale once the team gets moving again.

The class system in Kirstendale is pretty weird; it’s hard to describe. Not only is metal a precious material here (as expected), but the city and its environs are barren as far as animals fit to be eaten goes. Meat is a luxury that has to be imported, and in a pre-industrial world, without planes or even steamships, you can guess how expensive bringing in meat would be. As such Kirsters (as they’re called) are generally vegetarian, although it’s implied that they will resort to eating bugs if they see it fit. Prestigue in the city is also pretty much entirely performative, in that it’s not your family line or even how much money you have that detemines your status as much as how you carry yourself, such that someone can act as both master and servant in the span of a single day depending on what clothes they’re wearing. As far as I can tell Vance was a conservative, but his playing with class barriers—poking fun at the tenuousness of class division—must’ve tickled Moorcock’s pickle. This is the most entertaining and inventive section of the novel.

If you read enough of this novel you may be wondering where that bastard Lysidder is. Like where he at? The fuck? The man does not even appear, let alone have a line of dialogue, until the final stretch the novel. Glystra meeting Lysidder face to face is one of those moments, like Charles Marlowe meeting Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, where the man has been shrowded in so much mystery as to become a mythological figure. This is made more stark by the fact that once we do get to Lysidder, Corbus and Nancy are the only fellow travelers in the party left—and Nancy turns out to have been working for Lysidder the whole time. Wow, the woman who’s been acting a little suspicious for dozens of pages is the spy! Indeed she was disguised as a nun at the beginning of the book, hence her secrecy and the fact that we never saw the body; she had faked her death, only to take on the role of a simple Big Planet girl once the team sets out.

Glystra takes it easy on Nancy because ~~she’s a woman~~ her partnership with Lysidder is framed as abusive… or so she says. Glystra and Corbus come up with a different plan for Lysidder and his henchmen, which on a reread surprised me more than it must’ve initially. Having hijacked Lysidder’s “air-car,” Glystra decides to drop the scoundrel off in the middle of nowhere, far out enough where going back to his hideout would probably be suicide—but technically it would be possible to survive in this new environment. “If you stay here, you’ll probably have to work for a living—the worst punishment I could devise,” Glystra tells Lysidder half-jokingly, and that’s the last we see of the novel’s villain. It’s not all a loss for Lysidder, though; if his final argument with Glystra is to make the case that forcing Big Planet under Earth rule would be a mistake then the villain wins, because Glystra and Corbus end up not going to Earth Enclave after all.

Precious commissions to Earth Enclave are said to have never returned, mostly probably because they meet a grisly end, but there’s the implication that those who survive don’t come back because they find Big Planet to be a sort of Eden—a garden untarnished by industrialism and imperialism. With the resources they already have, Glystra and Corbus would be rich enough to become landowners, maybe even return to Kirstendale and catch up with Cloyville, and ultimately they decide that’s better than to have Big Planet become yet another satellite for Earth. Sure, conditions are rough, and even at its most decadent it’s not a place for the weak, but Vance seems to be telling us that maybe it really is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. A bit of an unconventional happy ending, but I like it.

A Step Farther Out

So there you have it. In some ways Big Planet is a simple novel; it reads almost like an escort mission in a video game, which if you play your fair share of games doesn’t sound like a good time. True enough it does threaten to get monotonous at times, partly because of the characters being little more rounded than cardboard and coming and going through the narrative as they please, but it also shows Vance refining his craft as a novelist. Its best parts, which could almost work as short stories in themselves, read like episodes in a larger narrative, though this is not a fix-up like The Eyes of the Overworld, the first real novel in the Dying Earth series. In hindsight the episodes blur together with the exception of the first stretch, the episode in Kirstendale, and the finale, which admittedly is a pretty good finale by Vance standards. This is an early work that shows Vance trying to write a conventional adventure SF novel of the period and failing to the degree, which makes it more memorable than some of its peers.

Given the intricacies of what we do see of Big Planet, this is the kind of setting that could serve as venue for a trilogy of novels, each one over 500 pages long; but because Vance came from a generation of SFF writers who believed in not wasting the reader’s time, we’re left with two slim novels. We did eventually get an indirect followup with Showboat World in 1975, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t share anything with its predecessor other than the planet itself—which is just as well. Vance loves exploring settings, but for better or worse he’s not much of a plotter, which would explain why I struggled to recall what happened in Big Planet prior to this reread. No doubt I’ll forget again, but I’ll remember Kirstendale.

See you next time.