What the hell, a whole month went by and nothing crazy happened that wasn’t work-related. Well, the SFF magazines are being choked out by big daddy Bezos and Twitter is now no longer Twitter, but aside from that, everything has been pretty normal!
I’m being sarcastic.
To keep your mind off the fact that the short story within the context of genre publishing is an endangered species and that readers can hardly be bothered to support the lifeblood of the field, let’s read some stories! We have a curious set this month, focusing more on fantasy, which is not normally my thing; indeed the only science fiction stories covered this month are the novellas. Much like pushing myself just a little bit when trying a new food, fantasy is a genre I treat, paradoxically, with both caution and enthusiasm. Enough wasting time, though…
For the serials:
Skull-Face by Robert E. Howard. Serialized in Weird Tales, October to December 1929. Howard wrote for only twelve years, debuting in 1924 and stopping with his suicide in 1936—at age thirty. Most writers barely get their feet off the ground by the time they’re thirty, but not only was Howard a natural-born storyteller, he wrote at a blistering pace such that he still accumulated a vast body of work. Skull-Face is a standalone fantasy, predating Conan by a few years.
The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson. Serialized in Unknown, March to May 1940. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novel. This was not published in book form until 1964, a 24-year gap that normally would imply the author had died in the interim—only Williamson was not only alive but had another 42 years left in him. Was not Williamson’s first go at fantasy, but it marked his first appearance in Unknown, a new fantasy magazine with more exacting standards.
For the novellas:
“Immigrant” by Clifford D. Simak. From the March 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The review for this will be posted on Simak’s 119th birthday, which is the least we can do for the man. With the wave of “empathetic” and pastoral SF in recent years, especially the works of Becky Chambers, some have looked back to Simak (rightfully) as a direct ancestor. “Immigrant” hopefully will see Golden Age SF’s most compassionate writer in good form.
“Singleton” by Greg Egan. From the February 2002 issue of Interzone. I was gonna tackle “Oceanic” originally, but that seemed too obvious and maybe not characteristic of Egan’s work. I’ve been quasi-binging Egan’s short fiction as of late, because he interests me. Egan’s one of the major voices in transhumanist science fiction, as well as one of the first Aussie writers to leave a mark on the field. He’s also notoriously aloof; there are no pictures of him on the internet.
For the short stories:
“The Dreaming City” by Michael Moorcock. From the June 1961 issue of Science Fantasy. I’ve read a couple Moorcock stories before, but truth be told he’s one of those authors I’ve been slow to get around to because of a bad first impression. Let’s just say I’m not a fan of his essay “Starship Stormtroopers.” But still Moorcock has been an earnest chronicler of fantasy for the past six decades, and to celebrate we’re going back 62 years to the start of his Elric saga.
“Travels with My Cats” by Mike Resnick. From the February 2004 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo winner for Best Short Story. Resnick was one of the most popular and frequent contributors to Asimov’s in the ’90s and 2000s, winning three of his five Hugos there, with his Kirinyaga series being one of the most decorated in genre fiction. I intentionally picked a standalone story because the Kirinyaga stories kinda bug me, and also I like cats. 🙂
For the complete novel:
The Dwellers in the Mirage by A. Merritt. From the April 1941 issue of Fantastic Novels. During his life and in the years immediately following his death, Merritt was one of the most beloved American fantasists, at least among pulp readers; he even got a magazine named after him with A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine. Nowadays Merritt is obscure enough to have “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. The Dwellers in the Mirage was first published in 1932, but its printing in Fantastic Novels was the first time Merritt’s preferred ending was incorporated, making it the preferred version.
One last thing I wanna mention is that I’ll be revamping my method for reviewing serials. I’ll be writing about the first installment in the same way as usual, but I’ve come to realize that for subsequent installments there are a couple sections of my review formula that are really unnecessary; for example we don’t need an introductory section where I give context to the author if we’re already in the middle of a work by said author. As such you can expect a more streamlined reading experience when we get to the second installment of Howard’s Skull-Face. Things will look a bit different, but this is less a radical change and more like tweaking. Other than that, my review schedule should be back to normal.
(Cover by Art Sussman. Amazing Stories, Oct-Nov 1953.)
Who Goes There?
This is another case where I have to try to not fanboy out, becaue I respect Richard Matheson a lot and I’ll give anything he writes at least one try. Matheson entered the field in 1950 with a remarkable short-short story titled “Born of Man and Woman,” which instantly made him popular with readers and which remains (impressively for a debut) one of the more reprinted stories in all of genre fiction. Matheson’s subsequent efforts, including “Third from the Sun,” “Dress of White Silk,” “Witch War,” “Through Channels,” and others, were not quite to the level of that first story, but they showed a naturally gifted storyteller who casually wandered across different genres, from science fiction to straight horror. When Matheson turned to novels he proved good at that too, with I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man being two of the most disturbing and thought-provoking SF novels of the ’50s. He would win a Hugo for adapting The Shrinking Man into the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man (the added word is justified, the film is indeed incredible), and Matheson’s new career as a screenwriter was just getting started.
There’s a high chance that if you tracked SFF film and TV in the ’60s that you encountered Matheson in screenwriting mode, including but not limited to the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within” (really one of the better season 1 episodes) and some Roger Corman productions, including House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death. The thing Mathesone would associate with the most, though, was The Twilight Zone—the ’60s and ’80s runs but especially the former. Along with Charles Beamont, Matheson contributed quite a few scripts to the original series, second in quantity (although not necessarily in quality) only to Rod Serling himself. Today’s story, “Little Girl Lost,” was itself adapted by Matheson for a Twilight Zone episode, though I have to admit my memory of this one is foggy.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October-November 1953 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted as a “classic” in the April 1967 issue, which can be found here. It’s been reprinted several times, although not as many as I would’ve thought. The most relevant of the bunch, at least to my interests, would have to be The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Matheson, and Charles G. Waugh), which, as you can guess, collects the short stories that served as the basis for Twilight Zone episodes. The most recent reprint is Duel: Terror Stories by Richard Matheson, which might still be in print although it’s hard to tell, especially since the quintessential Matheson collection is now Penguin’s The Best of Richard Matheson (which does not include “Little Girl Lost”).
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Chris and Ruth are a young couple living in a California apartment who one night hear their daughter Tina crying, and like any reasonable man Chris gets up to see what the trouble is. He has to make his way into the living room. “Tina sleeps there because we could only get a one bedroom apartment.” It’s dark, but he can at least hear her. One problem: she’s not on top of the sleeper sofa. Tries reaching under the sofa: she’s not there either. And yet Chris can hear her crying… from somewhere. Tina has to be somewhere in the apartment and yet Chris can’t figure out where she could be. The dog, who’s out on the patio at night, has also started barking like crazy, which doesn’t help. This is a story structured such that it starts off at its most tense and gradually becomes less so, as you’ll see.
Context is important, and we know enough about Matheson to get it. He probably wrote “Little Girl Lost” in early 1953, at which point he was not only a newly married man but father of one (with more to come), and he apparently based the story on struggling to find his daughter one night when she was crying. This is a story about people around my age: a few years out of college, maybe married with their first kid or with one on the way, although Chris and Ruth were not able to buy a house at this point in their lives. I relate to these two, because I also can’t afford a house. Anyway, it doesn’t take long for the young couple to break into hysterics over figuring out where their daughter could’ve gone. She can’t have been abducted, becaue they can hear her, but she’s not in the living room or kitchen, or anywhere else in the apartment they can think of. I heard a criticism somewhere that Ruth is written in the typical “hysterial woman” fashion of the ’50s, but to be fair to her, it would take an iron will to not freak out about this situation, especially if it’s in the middle of the night.
(If you wanna lose some sleep then look up stories about people accidentally locking themselves inside convenience store freezers and being found as corpses in the morning. Have fun with that.)
Chris, instead of calling the police, hits up his friend Bill. “I’d called him because he’s an engineering man, CalTech, top man with Lockheed over in the valley.” Not ideal, but Chris can’t think of a better option in the heat of the moment. Maybe what’s happened to Tina can’t be explained by normal procedure and someone in the sciences ought to be brought in. Because this is a science fiction story and because some of us have seen the Twilight Zone episode beforehand, it’s rather hard to spoil this one. As such, I’ll make a couple more observations before we get into the back end, where there’s not a lot to talk about. This story, after all, is not quite ten pages long and those pages go by at a mile a minute. Matheson’s style is not pulpy but it’s certainly not concerned with fancy language; it goes down smooth, like the average experience of reading a screenplay. I interned as a script reader years ago and the best scripts (or rather the least bad) describe action as economically as possible, with no room given to purple prose antics.
Another thing to consider is that short stories are great for adapting into short films and TV episodes. You may notice that a lot of the shorts comprising Love, Death + Robots are based on short stories, and in those cases the filmmakers can choose to be as faithful to the source material as they want, making the shorts at just the “right” length to cover everything without need for padding. Now, when adapting a ten-page story into a 25-page teleplay, some padding is required. You could easily do the plot of “Little Girl Lost” justice in a short that’s about as long, one page per minute of screentime, but Matheson, when adapting his story for TV, undoubtedly had to make concessions. I don’t remember the Twilight Zone episode too well, but I do remember that structurally it stayed close to the source material; most importantly it retains the climax and tries its best considering it has to work with budget and effects of that era.
There Be Spoilers Here
Eventually the couple let their dog into the apartment, whereupon the dog apparently sniffs out where Tina is and finds what can only be described as a crack in the spacetime fabric that soon sees dog and then Chris fall through it. Chris slips into this other world that’s at once darker than the depths of the ocean and yet filled with blinding lights. “It was black, yes—to me. And yet there seemed to be a million lights. But as soon as I looked at one it disappeared and was gone. I saw them out of the sides of my eyes.” This is undoubtedly the money shot for both short story and TV episode, as we see the mundane apartment replaced with something very different that would strike anyone as alien. The justification for the dimension gap is about as silly as you’d expect, but it at least justifies the story’s escalation into borderline cosmic horror before we earn our happy ending.
The sofa and TV set have now been swapped in the living room so that nobody will be tempted to fall through that crack between dimensions. Call me a zoomer, but I have to look up who Arthur Godfrey is. Actually I’m not ssure if people twenty years older than me know who that is.
A Step Farther Out
It’s short, it’s slight, it’s not exactly deep, but it is evocative and it has imagery in the back end that would translate well to a visual medium. Matheson was a wizard when it came to moving a plot along and while “Little Girl Lost” is simple, it goes down in an even shorter time than its page count would suggest. I was gripped by this extended metaphor for what it’s like to be a young parent and to experience something horrible you’ve probably never thought about before—not until you became responsible for someone’s life. Just remind me to never have kids; a dog sounds better.
Walter M. Miller, Jr. is what a lot of people would call a one-book wonder. A Canticle for Leibowitz capped off what had been an impressive streak in the ’50s, earning Miller a Hugo and to this day remaining a much admired and discussed novel; that secular readers take no issue with the novel’s overtly religious themes speaks of its power. Miller served as a bomber crewman during World War II and his wartime experiences compelled him to turn to Catholicism—a turning point in his life that very much explains today’s story. Make no mistake in thinking Miller was some happy-go-lucky convert, though, as he would suffer from depression for much of his life—an outlook that only grew darker as he aged, eventually resulting in his casting aside the Church and committing suicide, leaving his final novel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, to be finished by Terry Bisson. We’ll never know what more Miller could’ve contributed to the field had he published even a single new word of fiction between 1960 and his death in 1996, but he seemed to have said all he needed to say.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September-October 1953 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. It was also reprinted as a “classic” in the May 1966 issue of Fantastic, which can be found here. “Wolf Pack” was reprinted in book form only once, in the anthology Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time (ed. Judith Merril), which has been out of print since the ’50s. This story has not seen print anywhere since 1966, which is criminal to me. Miller’s body of short fiction is small enough that you could gather all of it (minus the Leibowitz stories, of course) together in one (admittedly chunky) volume. Why has nobody done this yet?
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The sun hasn’t quite come up on the horizon yet, but it’s already time for the bombers to get ready for their shift, dressing in coveralls and bomber jackets, “stuffed candy bars and bail-out kits in their knee-pockets, buckled low-slung forty-fives about their waists,” some of whom will not be returning. Mark Kessel is a capable crewman, having flown 46 missions in a B-25 and so close to earning his leave. We’re not flying over Germany or Japan, but Italy, over the the city of Perugia. “Perugia was a bulge in an artery that fed the Wehrmacht fist.” Pretty standard, heading out to bomb supply routes so as to starve the Nazis. Just another flight for Mark.
But there’s a problem. Actually two problems. The first is that Mark has become detached from his girlfriend back home, whom he hasn’t thought about much while in Europe, and the other is that he’s in love with some Italian woman named La. Thing is, La isn’t real—or is she? Mark has never met La (short for La Femme, and doesn’t sound like ammo for allegory) in person, yet he’s seen her and heard her voice with such clarity—more vividly than one would expect in dreams. Strangely, when Mark thinks of La, the latter does not speak English like you’d expect in a fantasy, but in her native tongue. Mark thinks this is just a symptom of being away from home so long. “He had not seen an English-speaking woman in so long that even the image of La spoke Italian.” Even so, he’s unsure if what he’s dealing with is a product of his own imagination or something else.
Regardless, there’s a job to be done.
Taking a step aside here, as the plot is very simple, let’s talk about Miller’s background and how it justifies the existence of “Wolf Pack.” Like Mark, Miller was a bomber crewman during World War II; he flew over fifty missions and took part in the destruction of an Italian religious landmark: a Benedictine Abbey. Mark is also, like his creator, a Catholic, although it’s unclear if Mark is a convert like Miller or was raised in the faith but that part doesn’t really matter. For both character and author, the cost of war doesn’t seem to be just physical but metaphysical—the loss of mankind’s capacity to be in touch with something greater and more virtuous than itself. Even before we take off, in a “scarred and decrepit” ship called the Prince Albert, there’s a strong hint that Mark is on the verge of suffering a mental health crisis, a crisis of faith, or both. There’s a passage early on that gives us a vivid impression of Mark’s eroding mental state.
I am a machine, he thought. Or a part of a machine. A machine with five human parts geared in with the aluminum, glass, and steel. They screw us into our places and we function like pistons, or cogs, or vacuum tubes. We, who were five, become one, and that beats hell out of the Trinity.
Reading this I was genuinely unsure of when the fantastical element was gonna come into play, since this is after all a genre story. Mark has visions of an Italian woman whom he has probably never met, but this can be easily explained as fantasies—a coping mechanism to help Mark live with the fact that he could get shot down on his next flight, a whole ocean dividing him from his homeland. Indeed you can show “Wolf Pack” to someone without the pretense of reading genre fiction and they would be very unlikely to question it. Part of it has to do with the ambiguity of what’s happening to Mark, but we must also give Miller credit for being one of the finest wordsmiths in ’50s SFF. I assume not every short story he wrote was this poetic, but despite being obscure in an already overlooked oeuvre, “Wolf Pack” reads as deeply personal for Miller—something he wanted to get out there, and without half-assing it.
The plot is simple, sure, but the feelings involved are not. Mark seems to be on the verge of a violent religious awakening, yet like Miller he’s also deeply troubled; these are not men who think of belief in Jesus as saving their souls so much as preventing them from walking off a cliff. A Canticle for Leibowitz is beloved by many readers, most of whom are not Catholic, and I think the reason why the religiosity of that and Miller’s other works (for make no mistake, “Wolf Pack” is a profoundly Christian story) doesn’t alienate people is because it doesn’t pretend that such belief will instantly fix everything. This is not some evangelical preachfest that’s trying to convince people (or, more likely, to reinforce certain beliefs), but a work of art wherein the artist tries to make sense of something terrible that happened to him. It’s autobiographical to an extent, which, as I’ll discuss below, does not frame Miller’s mental health as being the healthiest.
There Be Spoilers Here
The V-shaped squad of bombers, the titular wolf pack, turns inland to do its run, narrowly avoiding “death-blossoms” of anti-air gunfire, and unbeknownst to Mark it’s already too late to turn back—not just from the mission but from something else the planes are about to do. There’s that feeling, that specific feeling you can only parse in French, that makes Mark’s nerves uneasy—because he’s been here before. This place is oddly familiar; not just the feeling of being in a cramped airplane with the same guys after a few dozen missions, but being here, over this land and this water specifically. He hears La again, only this time Mark knows this is not a dream—and that she hates him, for what he’s about to do, as part of his job. The implication here is that La is real, that she’s on the ground, and that she knows who Mark is. “He had flown this mission before. He knew about the lake, and it was the same lake. He knew about her language and her mannerisms. He knew down deep—who she was, and where she was, and what she was.” Mark breaks down and tries turning the plane around, only for his fellow crewmen to stop him—which makes sense from their perspective, since as far as they’re concerned Mark is having a mental breakdown.
And maybe he is.
La gets killed in the bombing run, assuming she really existed. We never get any concrete explanation or evidence as to how these two people could’ve come into contact, which might label “Wolf Pack” as an ambiguous fantasy; it’s certainly hard to argue for as science fiction. Still, Mark never hears La’s voice in his head again, and the ending sees him recovering as someone who suffered a case of “combat fatigue,” or what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We could choose to take Mark’s telepathic communication with La at face value, but it’s also easy to read the story as an extended metaphor for PTSD. If what happens in the story and what we know about Miller are to be taken into consideration, it’s easy to read the whole thing as anti-war, stating that war is not only destructive, but ungodly; it drives men to act against God’s will. For Miller, war, no matter how virtuous in its aims, is something that turns men into machines—into mechanized creatures that are no longer capable of spirituality. In a way it reminds me of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, which frames war as being inherently against Nature (which may as well be God for Malick) and thus horrific.
A Step Farther Out
Why “Wolf Pack” has not been picked up in the past half-century I don’t know; maybe because it’s such a downbeat story, even by Miller’s standards, or that it’s honestly hard to classify as fantastical literature. I’m not sure whether to count it as SF or fantasy myself. It could also be that there isn’t much SFF about World War II written after the fact and by actual World War II veterans, such that it stands out. This is a difficult story, far more of a downer and more depressing than what would’ve been the norm in early ’50s SFF—and yet it’s hard to imagine such a story being published at any other point in time. It has to be one of Miller’s most personal narratives, and yet it has been cited basically nowhere when people discuss Miller. I know few people read my blog, but I do know at least a couple editors in the business who read it, and this last message is for them: Find a way to bring “Wolf Pack” back into print, maybe via a themed anthology. It’s not the best story I’ve read all month (although it’s up there), but it’s the story that I feel most deserves to be rediscovered by modern readers.
(Cover by Richard Powers. Beyond Fantasy Fiction, September 1953.)
Who Goes There?
I’ve read a handful of short stories by Margaret St. Clair at this point, which I understand is not much, but every one of these has something memorable about it. St. Clair got started in the late ’40s and for little over a decade was one of the most prolific female writers in the field—until, so it seems, market forces changed. Although she lived a long life, St. Clair wrote little fiction after 1960, focusing more on novels (and not being a prolific novelist at that) while the intervals between short stories stretched into years. It’s a shame, because her formal talent with the short form is almost unmatched among ’50s SFF writers. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” caught my attention just from its title, but its inclusion in Beyond Fantasy Fiction (H. L. Gold’s short-lived fantasy sister magazine to Galaxy) gave me even more hope. Also, as is typical with St. Clair, this is indeed short and… bitter, actually. I struggled to come up with a review for a bit.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction, which is on the Archive. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” has only been reprinted in English twice, in the St. Clair collection Change the Sky and Other Stories, and in the chunky anthology Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer). Both are very much out of print.
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We start with an opening paragraph that I swear has a couple words missing due to a printing error (oh yes, the Gold magazines having shitty copy-editing, home sweet home), but once we get past that we’re introduced to Paul, a street bum, and a mysterious woman who clearly has a supernatural aura about her. It takes Paul a surprisingly short time to come to grips with the fact that the woman is the titular goddess—and that she’s a goddess who’s practically on her deathbed. Even so, a dying goddess has an unworldly beauty, and Paul, like any reasonable hetero man, offers to be her servant. If written today this would be the beginning of a beautiful BDSM relationship, but this is the ’50s so no dice. You think I’m joking, but their relationship quickly takes on a master/pet dynamic.
It’s not clearly immediately that Paul is a bum, but we soon discover the extent of his poverty, in that, being jobless, he get his blood drawn (apparently too often for the local nurse’s liking) for a quick buck. Not only is he single, but he doesn’t rwally have any friends aside from presumably his fellow street bums. The goddess does something unusual in that she asks Paul about his day, about his latest romantic outings, as if such information helps her—although the implication is that it does. The two do not form a romantic bond exactly, but it’s sort of like romance by proxy—except something even weirder happens. To satisfy his goddess’s wants, Paul walks around outside doing nothing in particular, only thinking up stories to tell that would satisfy her. At first I thought this was selfish on Paul’s part, but something to keep in mind that the dude is dead broke; he does not have the money to be asking girls out and eating at restaurants, although the goddess doesn’t seem to understand this.
With what I just said you may be expecting a “liar revealed” plot twist to occur, or for the goddess to call out Paul’s dishonesty; but no, she accepts every word he says without question… maybe because she can’t afford to take them for what they are. It’s depressing, and yet Paul is basically framed as doing right by indulging the goddess’s wants in her last days. If you’ve had elderly members of your family go into hospice or retirement homes, and they might not be all there mentally anymore, you or an older family member might make some shit up when talking to their elders so as to make them feel better, and the elders don’t question it. I remember when my paternal grandma was in retirement care and up to the end we acted like my other grandma (my mom’s mom) was still alive, though she had died a couple years prior. The two were friends, of course. What the old lady didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. Shit, that does sound bad.
I was expecting some commentary on how the Abrahamic religions have driven the old pagan faiths into exile, like in American Gods, and because the goddess is clearly of pre-Christian vintage, but it ended up being a steady downward spiral about a stranger trying to help a fellow stranger whose condition is terminal. The fantasy element reads as allegorical here, as the goddess comes of as an old but still beautiful woman whom Paul loves but is unable to satisfy directly, both becaue of a physical gap and because Paul lives in such abject poverty that he has to steal when he can. This is like if a character in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row were to, without even thinking twice about it, fall into an urban fantasy tale, although unlike Steinbeck St. Clair doesn’t seem interested in commenting on poverty so much as using a character’s class for the sake of the allegory.
There Be Spoilers Here
The ending is inevitable, and the “twist” is not much less inevitable. Personally I wouldn’t have saved the revelation that the goddess is Aphrodite until the end, because a) it reads as predictable, b) it’s given to us via the omniscient third-person narrator and not either of the characters, and c) the fact that this is the Greek goddess of love doesn’t matter as much as you would think. Sure, it relates to how the goddess wants to hear about Paul’s fabricated love life, but having the deity who’s dying for lack of followers be a love god strikes me as a bit on-the-nose. Does that make it any less depressing when Aphrodite finally goes and leaves Paul alone, destitute, and now an alcoholic? I have to say no.
A Step Farther Out
I feel a little bad about this one. I had read the story (very easily in one sitting) a couple days ago and then proceeded to not put any words to paper about it until the last minute. A minor case of writer’s block. It’s not that this is a bad story; quite the contrary, I was thinking about the implications of the ending long after reading it. Just that with St. Clair’s writing I feel like the quality of it speaks for itself, in a way that’s unencumbered with fancy language. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” is not even the most downbeat St. Clair story I’ve read, but it has an atmosphere that could easily give one the blues. It’s only ten pages long, but it’s not what I would recommend as a casual read. St. Clair can be merciless.
One of the things that made The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction unique in its early years was its mysterious ability to attract authors who normally wouldn’t be caught dead in one of the genre magazines. In the ’50s, if you were a “serious” short story writer (and wanted the big bucks), you would aim for The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and even Playboy. Still, you had famous mainstream authors like Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson appearing in F&SF without issue. Ann Warren Griffith is another one of these mainstream authors, although she is leagues more obscure (at least now) than Bradbury and Jackson. According to Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas’s intro for “Captive Audience,” Griffith was “an actress, a librarian, a shipfitter, a pilot in the WASPS, a Red Cross ‘overseas-type girl,’ an ‘editorial assistant-type girl’ on trade magazines and, of course, a writer.” Griffith was apparently busy in several outlets, but she only wrote two SFF stories, both of them for F&SF.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1953 issue of F&SF, which is on the Archive. To my surprise “Captive Audience” has been reprinted a few times over the decades, including The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Third Series (ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas), reprinting what the editors felt were the best F&SF stories from 1953. There’s also Tomorrow, Inc.: Science Fiction About Big Business (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander), which sounds like catnip for those who want SF that satirizes American capitalism. For something that’s more recent and in print we look toward Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), edited by… somebody. I wish I knew who this person was.
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This is gonna be half a review and half an essay on the nature of dystopian science fiction, because frankly I don’t have a lot to say about “Captive Audience” but I do have a fair bit more to say about how it figures into the hitory of dystopian SF. The subgenre goes back a long way—back to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and even further back to E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Jack London’s The Iron Heel, although the first of these is often cited as the prototypical dystopian SF work. Regardless, these are stories about Bad Futures™, wherein the author makes an “If this goes on—” kind of statement, in some way criticizing some aspect of what was then their current society. Dystopia is typically defined by taking a current issue and taking it to a logical extreme. For example, Ray Bradbury reacted to what he saw as TV enabling anti-intellectualism with book burnings in Fahrenheit 451, and Aldous Huxley reacted to the rampant hedonism of the 1920s by turning it into a cult of pleasure in Brave New World.
In the case of “Captive Audience” the explosive rise in consumer culture in the years following World War II is taken to an admittedly cartoonish extreme by having advertisements that talk to you constantly. It’s the near-future—so near that it more reads like a slightly altered version of the ’50s—and we’re met with Fred and Mavis, a happy well-to-do couple who in most ways embody the “ideal” affluent American family. Fred is the Assistant Vice President of Sales at MV, short for Master Ventriloquism; like most vapid shitheads he’s into marketing. Fred and Mavis make for almost a perfect couple, except Fred has to deal with a certain in-law. “Fred honestly didn’t know if he would have gone ahead and married Mavis if he’d known about her grandmother.” Grandmother has been in jail for the crime of wearing earplugs, after the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional since they obstruct advertising—the freedom of marketing being held higher than freedom of the individual.
I wanna say the Supreme Court would never make so assbackwards a decision, but the past few years have shown us that this is actually the most believable part of the story.
In the America of “Captive Audience,” advertising is not only virtually omnipresent, but quite vocal; even cereal boxes will sing jingles at you, which makes me wonder how these things are profitable, given the tech involved. Going back to Brave New World, advertising has so thoroughly infiltrated the human psyche that people will regurgitate jingles at each other—that they will even think about jingles and slogans as if they’re Bible passages. Both Huxley and Griffith satirize the mindless pleasure-seeking that would’ve been spreading during what were, incidentally, years of huge economic growth in the US especially. Fred and Mavis are total converts of this new pleasure-at-all-costs mindset and are thus totally devoid of humanity; these are not sympathetic characters, although it’d be hard to call them monstrous. The funniest scene hass to be where Mavis has a splitting headache and decides she needs an aspirin, only she can’t pick between the three bottles she has based on their advertising—so she takes one of each. Robert Sheckley would’ve been proud to write this bit.
As for Grandmother, she fits into this weird archetype of the one character in a dystopian narrative who remembers the beforetimes. She is apparently the only person Fred knows who rejects the ad overload of the modern age, and when she gets out of prison her rebellious attitude is liable to ruin Fred’s reputation as an upstanding citizen. Aside from the inherent joke of an old lady being a remorseless “criminal,” I do have to wonder how much time has passed since American society metamorphized into this soulless hellscape that knows not love nor individuality; given the ’50s-isms it’s probable that Griffith didn’t mean the action to take place more than a couple decades into what was then the future. Endless jingles and Muzak pollute the ears of the populace, although strangely I don’t remember television getting more than maybe a few words of attention.
As with a lot of dystopian narratives, the characters are really not the highlight of the story. Grandmother is endearing, but she’s not the protagonist, being little more than a side character who appears so as to act as a reader surrogate; otherwise we would not be able to latch onto goddamn anybody. The closest we have to a real protagonist, the character who’s faced with a problem upon which the story hinges and whose actions matter the most, is Fred, whom as I’ve said is a shell of a man. Remember how John Savage, the “hero” of Brave New World, doesn’t even appear until halfway through the novel? Anyway, while there are a few good jokes here, and while Griffith’s observations are sadly on-point, I didn’t find myself thinking about this one much as I was reading it. “Captive Audience” is socially relevant now, especially since people have become more overtly anti-advertisement and anti-capitalist (again) in recent years. It’s pessimistic in that it assumes the average American is, or will become, incredibly stupid and short-sighted, but it’s sure not boring!
There Be Spoilers Here
Rather than try to change the world or even change her relatives’ minds, Grandmother finds she’s quickly gotten sick of the outside world and opts to return to prison. Again, it’s a little funny, this old lady who’s probably buddies with actual criminals. But the implication is that prison is partly where non-conformists go, those who commit the crime of standing “in the way of progress,” as Fred puts it, although what he means by progress is unclear. The story would be perfectly satisfactory if it were to stop there, but then Fred gets the “bright” idea that Grandmother is a non-conformist because being in prison has not allowed her to adapt to the brave new world. Prisoners aren’t consumers because they’re basically slaves so there’s the question of what to do about this “problem.” Indeed, what to do…
There are several flavors of dystopian ending: there’s the protagonist-gets-their-shit-kicked-in ending, the ray-of-hope ending, the Bolivian army ending, and so on. While Grandmother does not meet a destructive end like John Savage or Winston Smith, it’s implied that she and her kind will at some point be forced to join the crowd—that the skyscraper-high iron of capitalism, a la FLCL, will smooth out the wrinkles, as it were. I say this is a comedy, but it’s a bit of a dark one.
A Step Farther Out
I chuckled a couple times. “Captive Audience” has a grim ending but it’s more or less a comedy, and unfortunately an all-too-believable one. Still I find the problem here to be the same I have when reading Robert Sheckley stories, in that there’s a point being made and I can’t tell if there’s anything beneath that one meaning we’re supposed to take from it. It’s a ten-page story that was clearly meant to be taken a certain way so I can’t fault it much, but it’s just that I tend to like stories that make me think and feel more. The characters being totally superficial was no doubt intentional, but part of me wonders if this would’ve caught my eye more as a satire if it had more of a touch of humanity to it. But hey, it’s funny!
Philip K. Dick started out as a talented and prolific short story writer, honestly one of the field’s best given how old he was and the competition. Dick sold his first story in 1951 but would not get published until the following year (and with a different story), being broke, in his early twenties, having gotten kicked out of UC Berkley, and now getting the bright idea to try writing full-time. By the time of his death in 1982 he had written something like forty novels and 120 short stories, with about a quarter of those being published in 1953 alone. Dick wrote at a mile a minute, which means some of what he wrote was competent but only done to pay the bills. “Paycheck,” today’s story and one that quite shamefully I had never read until yesterday, is a case of Dick boiling the pot, as it were. Despite its banal title, this really is one of Dick’s best short stories. Not waiting to give my opinion on this; it’s just a lot of fun.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1953 issue of Imagination, which is on the Archive. What’s shocking to me is that “Paycheck” has never been anthologized in English, and also that despite being printed in a long-defunked second-rate magazine it’s not in the public domain; if you wanna read it you’ll have to read a magazine scan or find a Dick collection that has it. The good news is that there are many Dick collections and “Paycheck” is likely to be in any one of them, most notably Ballantine’s The Best of Philip K. Dick and The Philip K. Dick Reader.
Enhancing Image
Jennings is your typical working man, now finishing his two-year contract as a mechanic at Rethrick Construction—only he can’t remember what had happened during those two years. Not a minute of it. Nothing about his job, not even what he did outside of his job in all that time. Turns out Jennings got his memory wiped by the company, standard procedure, nothing to see here. This is troubling in itself, but things only get weirder once Jennings receives his pay, which is supposed to be an envelope with 50,000 credits. (I assume this is supposed to equate to a lot for two years’ labor in 1953 money.) Another weird thing, and just as concerning: the money isn’t there. Apparently Jennings, after starting his contract, chose an alternative over the conventional payment, and rather conveniently Jennings doesn’t remember doing that either. Hmmm.
Inside the envelope are seven items which normally would have little to no value: “A code key. A ticket stub. A parcel receipt. A length of fine wire. Half a poker chip, broken across. A green strip of cloth. A bus token.” Why would Jennings, in the past, have picked these specific things over 50,000 credits that he really could’ve needed? This baffles Jennings post-memory wipe, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He gets caught up on how things have changed in the two years since the start of his contract. The US has become a bit more authoritarian, with the Security Police patrolling city streets and keeping a close eye on the populace. This is also a future where I guess commercial flight never took off and instead we have “inter-city rockets,” which is one of those funny things that shows Dick had several talents but predicting future tech is not one of them.
At least Kelly, the company secretary, is nice.
Jennings leaves his job with his trinkets and hardly a minute passes before he gets picked up by SP goons, who are very curious about what he did for Rethrick Construction. Not being much of a fighter, Jennings would tell the cops what he knows—if only he knew anything. The memory wipe seems to have been a security measure for Rethrick, with even its employees being shut off from secret doings. It’s unclear what the SP are gonna do with Jennings, since they can’t get much info out of him, but the outcome will probably be grim; therefore escape sounds like a good idea. Jennings reaches into his pocket and pulls out the wire—of just the right length and material to pick locks and hightail it out of the SP building. But to go where? The SP probably know where he lives. If he’s to survive he’ll have to become a fugitive, or return to Rethrick.
Ah, but that bus ticket…
Bus to where? Does it matter? Possibly. Two of the items have been used and so far they’ve been shockingly useful. Jennings in the past must’ve requested these items for a specific reason, except that Jennings in the present can only guess as to their purpose. Surely it can’t be a coincidence. Something I wanna point out is that “Paycheck” reads like a compressed novel; it’s 13,000 words, a hearty novelette, but there’s enough suspense here to fuel a whole novel, only Dick comes from a generation of SFF writers that doesn’t believe in wasting the reader’s time. The only reason it took me two days to get through it is because I’ve been working since Thursday, so my time has been limited. If I had a whole day to myself I would’ve blazed through “Paycheck” in one sitting. In less than ten pages we’re introduced to a flamboyant future America, a likeable protagonist who’s not movie star material but still talented, and a plot that, once it kicks into motion, never ceases to intrigue me. And we’re just getting started.
Jennings realizes that the only real choice he has is to return to Rethrick Construction—only he doesn’t even remember where his own workplace was; he had been taken to a separate building, far away from the actual plant, to receive his payment. At the very least if he can find where the plant is he might be able to get hired again and hide from the SP, as while the SP can do many things they cannot interfere with business unless there’s an exception. This is an action narrative, but there are still a few nuggets of commentary from Dick, including a rather incisive moment where Jennings ponders that in the modern world it’s no longer the separation between church and state that divides man, but the separation between state and business. “It was the Government against the corporation, rather than the State against the Church. The new Notre Dame of the world. Where the law could not follow.” This rings true especially in the present day, but keep in mind that in the years following World War II Dick and his contemporaries would’ve seen an intense expansion of commercialism in American life. Capitalism had started to hit the fast-forward button.
Of course, as far as both Jennings and Dick are concerned the government is a bigger threat to human freedom than some company, even if said company memory-wipes its employees so that they don’t snitch to the competition or some third party. The memory-wiping thing would probably be used for more foreboding ends if used in a modern narrative, but here it’s little more than a pretext for Jennings to have a conversation with his past self. I won’t say there’s time travel here, but without getting too much into spoilers just yet there is a reason why Jennings is able to use the items he gave himself just when and where he needs them. Clearly these items were obtained in the past, but there’s no way Jennings could have discerned their usefulness without clairvoyance—or a time machine. This raises another question: What the hell could Rethrick be building, especially since they’re so keen on secrecy? The plot only thickens more when Jennings catches up with Kelly, who may or may not be just a secretary.
One more thing before we barrel into the back end of the story. “Paycheck” was published in the June 1953 issue of Imagination, but it was probably written a full year earlier, during the height of McCarthyism. Some editors in the field were squeamish about publishing material that criticized McCarthy and other anti-communism fanatics, but some stories slipped through the cracks. Jennings and Kelly have a bit of an argument where Kelly says that anyone who’s against the SP must be on the side of good, to which Jennings says, “Really? I’ve heard that kind of logic before. Any one fighting communism was automatically good, a few decades ago.” Dick was not a leftist, but he did have several leftist friends; in some ways he was a fellow traveler, although he did have hangups like his misogyny and anti-abortion stance. “Paycheck” does not indulge in misogyny like some other Dick narratives: Jennings is a bachelor, so minus the shrewish wife (or ex-wife) often found in Dick’s works, and Kelly, while not a three-dimensional character, is by no means a pushover.
There Be Spoilers Here
Using the parcel receipt to find the town where the plant is probably near and the green strip of cloth to disguise himself as a plant worker (well, he was a plant worker, after all, if only in the past tense), Jennings is able to retrace his steps and infiltrate the Rethrick plant, which of course is set in the middle of fucking nowhere—like a nuclear testing site. The narrative, which had hints of espionage up to this point, becomes practically a spy thriller once Jennings gets inside the plant with hopes of acquiring photos of schematics and blueprints. He has a theory about what’s being built here, but he needs to know—which might well spell his doom. Admittedly, and I have say unexpectedly, this section of the story is the least engrossing if I had to pick a weak spot, if only because this section reads like something out of a rather non-SF spy thriller and we already have a lot of those. Dick probably could’ve made more money writing spy thrillers, but he was too creative and thoughtful to be tied down like that.
This may be obvious to some, but Rethrick has in fact been working on a “time scoop,” or a time viewer as I’m gonna call it—a machine that can see into the future. “Like Berkowsky’s theoretical model—only this was real.” There are some questions that might arise when reading “Paycheck” if you stop and think, but the big one, how Jennings was able to predict his own future predicament, gets thoroughly answered. You may also be thinking, “If Rethrick has a time viewer then how come they haven’t been able to track Jennings’s movements?” Also answered: the time viewer had been sabotaged—by Jennings. The mad bastard snuck peeks at the machine and then fiddled with it such that even the company’s other top mechanics have so far been unable to get it working right again. His past self apparently had everything thought out; even the poker chip, broken in half, saves Jennings’s skin as he pretends to be a gambler who’s simply lost his way after curfew. Even the big twist, that Kelly is actually the daughter of Rethrick himself and that she planned to betray Jennings this whole time, gets accounted for. Is there anything this man cannot do…?
Turns out Rethrick is a family-owned business, with the ending implying that Jennings and Kelly will marry and that by extension Jennings will eventually take over the company. Kelly, despite being more loyal to her father than to Jennings, is implied to have had a fondness for Jennings when he worked at the plant; and even if that were not the case, I would be so impressed by Jennings’s gambit that I might just marry him anyway. Dick stories often have endings that are bleak, darkly comical, confusing, or all three at once, but “Paycheck” might have the most triumphant ending of any Dick story. I would gripe about the happy ending, as I did when I read Eye in the Sky and found that novel’s ending unconvincing, but here the victory had been alluded to almost from the beginning; indeed Jennings coming out on top is the point of the story. Dick wanted to write a story about how a man can save his own life, and even change it for the better, using everyday items that would seemingly be of no consequence; that he also wrote a great action narrative is the big cherry on top.
A Step Farther Out
Not sure if this is a hot take, but I think “Paycheck” deserved a Retro Hugo nomination more than “Second Variety.” In terms of Dick-penned action, “Paycheck” is a blockbuster only seriously topped by the second half of Ubik. Even when he’s unsure as to where a plot is going, Dick is supernaturally adept at pushing the reader from one set-piece to another with such swiftness that we can often forgive the inconsistencies—only “Paycheck” has to be one of the most tightly knit of Dick’s short stories. In a way it’s a power fantasy par excellence, pitting an unassuming but quick-witted man against a system that struggles to keep up with his maneuvers; in another way it has commentary that foreshadows Dick’s novels while also just so happening to feature a level of badassery that’ll have you cheering. Can’t wait to see how the Ben Affleck movie fucks it all up.
(The Demolished Man. Cover by Martin Herbstan. Shasta, 1953.)
Given the amount of fuckshit that’s been going on with this year’s Hugos, a lot of which I can’t even explain properly, and given that it’s the 70th anniversary of the inaugural Hugos, it’s probably apt to do a retrospective editorial on that now-alien time in SFF history. Before I do that, I ought to give a brief explanation of what the Hugos are, what Worldcon is, and how these have been integral to the organization of SFF fandom. I’m not saying this as an expert, but as an enthusiastic young fan who hopes to travel to some corner of the world with a Worldcon membership in the future. (Let’s face it, it’ll probably be Canada.) I may not have all my facts straight, so bear with me. I’d like to thank Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blogfor their rundown of what might’ve been nominated at the 1953 Hugos (be sure to put a pin in that “might’ve been”) and Jo Walton for her unabashedly subjective series on the Hugos up to the turn of the millennium.
The World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, is, as you may guess, the world’s leading science fiction (and, more recently, fantasy) convention, held almost every year and in theory an international gathering of writers, artists, filmmakers, and fans, complete with all the usual convention hijinks (except for, as far as I’m aware, the selling of not-safe-for-work body pillows at exuberant prices). Worldcon has increasingly lived up to its premise, but it started out as thoroughly American, with the first five Worldcons being held in the US and the first Worldcon held outside an English-majority country not coming until 1970, in Heidelberg, in what was then West Germany. Indeed there would not be a Worldcon held in a non-white majority country until the one in Yokohama, Japan in 2007. Does SFF, historically, have a whiteness problem? The short answer is yes, but that’s an editorial for another day. Things have gotten better, so there’s that.
The Hugo awards have been consistently a part of the Worldcon experience since 1953, and in the world of SFF they’re often thought of as the field’s equivalent of the Oscars (although if we’re going by voting process it’d be more accurate to call the Nebulas the SFF Oscars). A novel could certainly catch more eyes on bookstore shelves if it had a sticker saying “HUGO AWARD WINNER” on the cover. The Hugo is named after Hugo Gernsback: author, editor, failed businessman, and founder of the first science fiction magazine in the English-speaking world. Gernsback brought Amazing Stories into the world in 1926 and explicitly made it out to be a magazine that would publish science fact and fiction pieces, as opposed to just a magazine that would sometimes happen to publish science fiction. Gernsback held control of Amazing Stories for only a few years before moving on to other projects, but he got the ball rolling and by this point it’s a snowball akin to Godzilla—or more appropriately, King Ghidorah, with its multiple heads and tails. Point being, you may not know who Gernsback is, but if you’re an avid SFF reader then you probably know about the Hugos.
As of now there are 17 Hugo categories, with these encompassing damn near everything from prose fiction to graphic novels to TV show episodes (although curiously the attempt to give video games their own category has not panned out as of yet), and that’s not even getting into fan projects. (Totally not relevant here, but Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance is itself eligible for Best Fanzine!) But in 1953 there were only seven categories, and only one of them is still in service. The 1953 Hugos were held at Philcon II, in Philadelphia, and while we can see the primordial slime that would evolve into the awards ceremony we now recognize, a few of the categories now read as utterly disconnected from what modern fans care about or would even be aware of. My thesis is that the Hugos were initially concocted to celebrate science fiction as published in the magazines… and sadly too few people read genre magazines these days.
To list the categories for 1953:
Best Novel
Best Professional Magazine
Best Cover Artist
Best Interior Illustrator
Excellence in Fact Articles
Best New SF Author or Artist
#1 Fan Personality
The Best Novel category stands out as not only being the only prose category this year, but the only category to still be around (although, like the dinosaurs and the birds, a couple other categories would leave behind close relatives for the modern age). And why not? There will always be demand for novels; frankly it’s impossible to imagine an SFF readership without a continual list of bestselling novels. The winner was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which incidentally (actually it was quite deliberate) was the first novel I reviewed in serial form for this site. A lot of people would say The Demolished Man is a fine winner, but it’s also a bit of an odd one for a couple reasons. The first is that Bester is not what we’d call a novelist at heart; he had been active as a short story writer for more than a decade prior to this, and aside from his first two novels (the second being the even more revered The Stars My Destination) his best work is arguably his short fiction. The second is that, according to the time for eligibility for this year’s Hugos (basically August 1952 to August 1953), The Demolished Man should not have qualified since it was first published in the January to March 1952 issues of Galaxy Science Fiction. Still, it’s a flawed but intriguing novel that set a standard for both ’50s SF and futue Hugo winners.
What could’ve beat out The Demolished Man for Best Novel? We’re not sure since there was no shortlist put together for this year, but we can make a few educated guesses. The biggest rival would’ve almost certainly been Clifford D. Simak’s masterful “novel” City, which won the International Fantasy Award that year (the only other SFF award of any significance at the time, and rather prestigious in its own right), and which in my opinion would’ve been an even worthier winner than Bester’s novel. Another big contender would’ve been Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s caustic corporate espionage caper The Space Merchants, which was serialized in Galaxy only a few months after The Demolished Man. Other notable novels from 1952 include Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire and The Currents of Space, Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones, and Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence. While we were seeing more SF novels get hardcover releases, the magazine serial was still a high-profile affair.
Speaking of which, no doubt the success of Bester’s novel contributed to Galaxy tying with Astounding Science Fiction for Best Professional Magazine, which is a little fucked up considering this would be H. L. Gold’s only Hugo win. Of the “dead” categories, Best Professional Magazine lasted the longest, only being replaced by Best Professional Editor in 1973—a good twenty years later. This was done apparently to acknowledge the rising prominence of book editors, with people such as Damon Knight and Judy-Lynn del Rey giving major credence to original anthologies and paperback releases; a bit of a sad joke, because there would not be a non-magazine Best Professional Editor winner until Terry Carr in 1985. Still, it’s hard to argue with what won in 1953, with the two sides of American magazine SF at the time being equally represented—the hardboiled adventure SF of Astounding with the more cerebral and socially aware SF of Galaxy. Of course, there were so many magazines active, and so many of them publishing good material, that it must’ve been hard to not have a tie.
The next three categories I’ll go over in rapid succession, as I don’t have much to say about them, but they’re also anomalies in the history of the Hugos for how much they illustrate the prominence of magazine publishing at the time. Best Cover Artist was a tie between Hannes Bok and Ed Emshwiller, who were at very different stages in their careers. Emshwiller was a hot new artist who would go on to dominate SFF illustrating for the next decade while Bok was, sadly, a burnout who barely did genre illustrations at that point, let alone covers; the latter is certainly meant as career recognition. Best Interior Illustrator went to Virgil Finlay, and this is a hard one to argue with; we’re talking about one of the top three best interior illustrators in SFF history. Then there’s Excellence in Fact Articles, which went to Willy Ley for his science column in Galaxy. Best Interior Illustrator especially strikes me as a dinosaur here, as interiors have become functionally extinct in the field; even Analog and Asimov’s, which did interiors for decades, rarely do them anymore. Most genre magazines now straight-up don’t have interiors, but they were a big deal in 1953.
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, June 1952.)
The last two categories are interesting in that they have obvious descendants in the modern Hugos. Best New SF Author or Artist went to Philip José Farmer, who made his genre debut with “The Lovers” in the August 1952 issue of Startling Stories, and by the time he got his Hugo he had put out a few more stories that certainly helped his exploding reputation. What are the parameters for a “new” author here? I’m not sure. For the Astounding Award (which for some reason is not a Hugo, despite being given at the same ceremony, but which otherwise very much takes after the Best New SF Author or Artist Hugo) we know that authors have two years of eligibility within publication of their debut story. For this category I probably would’ve voted for Philip K. Dick, as he would not only become an 800-pound gorilla of the field, but even by the summer of 1953 he had amassed an impressive body of short fiction. Farmer had already published at least one story well before “The Lovers,” but it was, as far as I can tell, not science fiction or fantasy, and ISFDB doesn’t even mention it. Overall, I understand why Farmer caused enough buzz to win.
The last category is #1 Fan Personality, which went to Forrest J. Ackerman. What the fuck is this? #1 FanPersonality. There’s a lot to unpack here. This is not about the “best” fan, and it’s not even about who is the best fan writer necessarily. My assumption is that someone could have a certain reputation at conventions and fandom meetings and be eligible for this award. Keep in mind that members of what we call First Fandom, those who might’ve attended the first Worldcon in 1939, were extremely clique-y, and I mean to like a toxic degree. Of course, Ackerman was and would continue to be an important chronicler of SFF fandom for decades, so if anyone should get it it’s probably him. Still, this is primitive at best compared to what we now have, which is not one but four fan categories: Best Fan Writer, Best Fan Artist, Best Fanzine, and Best Fancast. Fandom has grown a profound amount in the past seventy years, but it’s also become way more scattered; it’s pretty common now to find earnest SFF readers who do not engage with fandom in any meaningful way.
The fan categories have consistently seen some of the lowest voter turnouts at recent Worldcons, despite Worldcon itself only existing because of fans from around the globe agreeing to make this thing happen. There are many fans who don’t read fanzines or listen to fan podcasts. There are many fans who read little to no short fiction and thus do not engage with magazines at all. There were no Hugos for short fiction in 1953, and even now the short fiction categories very much play second fiddle to Best Novel, which is the one that gets people riled up. It’s also safe to say Hugo voters by and large no longer care about science articles and interior illustrations, and there’s a reason why the Best Professional Magazine category turned to dust half a century ago. Fandom priorities have changed greatly; what they’re changing into I cannot say as of yet.
A favorite returns. I reviewed a bunch of Fritz Leiber works last December in time for his birthday, which was a decision I both do and do not regret. It’s demanding to binge an author’s stuff like I did, but the good thing about Leiber is that he’s versatile enough that you can hop around his career and find him in different modes: Fritz Leiber the science-fictionist, Fritz Leiber the adventure fantasist, Fritz Leiber the master of urban horror, etc. He made his genre debut in 1939 and for the next half-century would prove to be one of the most reliable writers of his generation, rivaled (in my opinion) only by Theodore Sturgeon and Clifford D. Simak; and of the three, Leiber is the one I enjoy most for the sheer beauty of his prose. Sturgeon can be overwrought, but Leiber has a hard time writing a bad sentence just ignore The Wanderer, all while showing humor and social awareness. Nowadays Leiber does not get as much credit as he deserves, with his fantasy series starring Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (incidentally the stars of his debut story) being almost as integral to the formation of American fantasy as Conan—yet so few people bring up these two lovable rogues now.
The early ’50s were an amazing time for science fiction, but not so much for fantasy. There were several attempts to start up hot new fantasy magazines and none of them worked out, folding within a couple years at the most. It’s telling that The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction started out as just The Magazine of Fantasy, but then changed its title after one issue. “The Seven Black Priests” would be the last Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story for four years, and most curiously it saw print in Other Worlds, which was very much an SF magazine. Leiber struggled to get the series published for much of its existence, given that it was a) adventure fantasy, b) rather low fantasy (in that magic doesn’t play much of a part in the world), and c) heavily reliant on short fiction, what with fantasy readers having an irrational fondness for novels that are bloated and meandering.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1953 issue of Other Worlds. “The Seven Black Priests” has never really been anthologized, but it has been collected a couple times and because it’s a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story it’s been available more or less consistently for the past half-century. The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser volume it’s included in, Swords Against Death, is still in print and is available in ebook and paperback from Open Road Media (if you hate yourself and don’t wanna buy an older edition).
Enhancing Image
We start with Our Heroes™ licking their wounds from having lost the loot of a previous adventure; because I haven’t read every Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story I can’t tell if said adventure is from another story or if it’s just something Leiber made up. Anyway, Leiber assumes, given the episodic nature of the series, that we might not’ve run into the best buddies from Lankhmar before, so we’re reintroduced to Fafhrd and the Mouser, the Mouser “clad all in close garments of gray, even to the hood which shadowed his swart features but could not conceal their pug-nosed impudence,” and Fafhrd, “a huge man with wrists thick as a hero’s ankles, yet lithe withal.” Fafhrd is a barbarian, a red-headed giant from a perpetually cold climate, while the Mouser is the short but quick thief. While they fit into RPG character classes, these are individuals who are difficult to confuse with other fantasy characters, especially from that period.
Speaking of cold, the two rogues are now in the Cold Waste, a wintery landscape that’s about as far from Lankhmar and civilization generally as one can get—only, despite appearances, Our Heroes™ are not alone. Within a couple pages we’ve gotten our first action scene, which indeed gets an interior illustration (courtesy of Michael Becker), as the Mouser faces off with a scrawny but feisty man, who goes toe to toe with the well-armed Mouser with just a knife and loincloth. The man is charcoal-black, although the boys suspect at first he might’ve gotten that complexion from the intense coldness of the area. Our Heroes™ send this knive-wielding lunatic tumbling to his death, but there’s an odd glow at the bottom of that dark pit that makes them uneasy; the man might not be dead after all. The boys continue on their way, not wanting to pay the incident too much mind, but “at least one other eye had seen the pulsing glow—an eye as large as a squid’s and bright as the Dog Star.” We may have to worry about more than just the black priests of the story’s title!
The Cold Waste is mostly snow and frozen vegetation, but there’s also a volcano that provides a bit of heat, along with a green hill by the volcano that houses what the black priests are obsessed over. The boys find, on that green hill, a strange idol with words in an ancient and mostly unknown language, along with (most relevant to our treasure hunters) an eye-like gem that is sometimes described as a diamond but which can’t really be one; it would, however, go for a fair price on the market. This whole thing gives off Indiana Jones vibes and personally I would not touch the damn thing, but given that Our Heroes™ are dead broke, the gem will have to do—even minding the priests who are eager to retrieve it. A couple things to note: there’s a long and not-talked-about-enough marriage between colonialism and treasure-hunting, which if you’re a buzzkill who can’t enjoy well-made entertainment would make characters like Indiana Jones and Nathan Drake less sympathatic. Fafhrd and the Mouser steal something which is not theirs, and it doesn’t help that the priests are from Klesh, a jungle-filled country that’s implied to be African-equivalent.
Leiber narrowly avoids turning the adventure into something that might be deemed too problematic, but I’ll say for now that at least the priests are not described in demeaning language that would normally be reserved for stereotyped black characters; they are, however, the butt of a couple jokes about clerics, which is more understandable. I’m not sure if Leiber was an atheist (he probably was), but there’s some playful ribbing of organized religion here that serves as both entertainment and which illustrates Our Heroes™ as anti-establishment. One of my favorite recurring elements of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories (and this applies to Conan as well) is that hierarchical figures are always viewed as, at best, aloof and untrustworthy. Fafhrd and the Mouser are always looking out for themselves and each other, and maybe their girlfriends if they happen to have those, but they don’t serve any particular authority figure.
For shits and giggles, here’s my favorite exchange:
“The seven black priests— ” Fafhrd muttered.
“The six,” the Mouser corrected. “We killed one of them last night.”
“Well, the six then,” Fafhrd conceded. “They seem angry with us.”
“As why shouldn’t they be?” the Mouser demanded. “We stole their idol’s only eye. Such an act annoys priests tremendously.”
It’s a funny.
“The Seven Black Priests” is the shortest Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story I’ve covered for this site thus far, and it’s both the simplest and most abstract. There aren’t any named characters aside from the boys, and indeed the only actors are the boys and the priests—plus a third party I’ve alluded to but whom I will not get deep into until the next section. The Cold Waste is a bit of a unique location because of the juxtaposition of the snowy landscape with the volcano, but the closest we get to shelter are caves. The plot is also pretty simple, with it being a protracted fight over a gem which itself may or may not have plans of its own. Normally I have a hard time following action in writing, but of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories I’ve covered I actually think this one is the easiest to get invested in if you’re not familiar with the series already; it’s a novelette, so it’s not exactly short, but it’s straightforward and because it has a small cast it shows Our Heroes™ doing what they do best without need for prior knowledge.
There Be Spoilers Here
Fafhrd was the one to take the gem, and since then he’s been acting a little weird at night; as if possessed he talks in a way that’s totally out of character for him, which should send the Mouser warning signs but because this story has to go on a bit longer the Mouser decides to not do anything about it for the time being. Given the known presence of supernatural objects in the world of the series I would’ve just assumed the gem that’s supposed to represent some ancient and evil god is haunted as shit, but that’s just me. One by one the priests get killed off, yet that doesn’t remove the problem of what to do with the gem, which as the story progresses compels Fafhrd to do things that strike the Mouser as unusual. It’s implied from the hieroglyphs on the idol that the priests have journeyed to the Cold Waste to pay respects to their god and prevent it from causing unspeakable mayhem, which if you put it that way makes the boys sound like the real villains, although a) the priests attacked first, and b) the boys could not have known initially what powers the gem had. Sometimes treasure is just treasure.
By the climax of the story it’s become clear that the gem plans to use Fafhrd as its puppet and kill the Mouser to complete its ritual, for “it needs the blood of heroes before it can shape itself into the form of man.” The Mouser is ultimately left with a choice: kill Fafhrd and take the gem for himself, or spare Fafhrd but destroy the gem. It’s a pretty easy choice on paper, actually. What makes Fafhrd and the Mouser heroic is not the fact that they do sometimes save people’s skins, but it’s that their love for each other always pulls them through in the end. Aside from its anti-authority stance, I find myself going back to the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories because they present a harsh low fantasy world where friendship redeems. You could even say that, for Our Heroes™, friendship is magic. Leiber rejects the toxic notion that men, in order to prove their “manliness,” must be ruthless and self-serving, instead giving us two undoubtedly masculine men who nevertheless unabashedly love each other. The Mouser destroys the gem and thus kills the mad god who had haunted the Cold Waste for centuries, but more importantly he does it for the sake of his best friend. Unlike most fantasy, male friendship is shown to be a magical power, even for two rogues who are no more wizardly than you and me.
A Step Farther Out
It’s a fun time! Yeah, I don’t have too much to add. This is the shortest and simplest Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story covered thus far and it certainly feels like that. “The Seven Black Priests” must’ve seemed like an odd choice for Other Worlds readers, but it must’ve also been like a puddle in a desert for those who liked heroic fantasy and, in the early ’50s, were getting precious little of it. While it’s not as ambitious as some of the other Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories I’ve read, or even reviewed, Leiber rarely disappoints with this series and he’s a wordsmith the likes of which we rarely see in old-school genre fiction. It’s guys being dudes in an exotic locale and there’s nothing wrong with that.
(Cover by Jack Coggins. Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1953.)
Who Goes There?
I don’t know what to make of Philip José Farmer, but in my defense his peculiar place in SF history is partly what has secured his legacy. It’d be easy to say Farmer is a New Wave author, but he’s a whole generation older than the New Wavers and indeed his roots are distinctly pre-New Wave, despite getting started late as a writer. Farmer was already in his thirties when his debut story “The Lovers” was published in the August 1952 issue of Startling Stories, and apparently readers went nuts over it. There was nothing in terms of content (although not style) that quite matched “The Lovers,” as it was rejected by both Astounding and Galaxy for its graphic (for the time) depiction of romance between a human man and an alien woman who appears human enough. Samuel Mines, editor of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, knew he had found a special talent, and Farmer’s first few stories (mostly in Mines’s magazines) led him to winning the Hugo (although nowadays it would be the Astounding Award) for Best New Author. In hindsight this can read as a bit odd, considering Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley debuted the same year as Farmer, but the old saying that sex sells was and continues to be true.
The author spotlight for today’s story, “Mother,” labels it as Farmer’s second story, although this would not have been true unless it was the second story Farmer had sold—which is quite possible. Mines singles out “Mother” as being even more transgressive than “The Lovers,” and despite the latter being more famous I think Mines is right; not only does it go into more devious territory than “The Lovers,” it’s also the better story! This is a well-structured and more engrossing tale of first contact, and I’m about to explain why it works in conjunction with Farmer’s Oedipal hijinks.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. I had first heard about “Mother” through its inclusion in the collection Strange Relations, not to be confused with the omnibus of the same title that also includes The Lovers (the novel version) and Flesh. I’ve read The Lovers and Flesh but not any of the stories in Strange Relations, which seem thematically related. Because “Mother” is a very good story it has been reprinted quite a few times elsewhere, most notably in the Farmer tribute collections The Best of Philip José Farmer and The Philip José Farmer Centennial Collection. If you like chunky anthologies there’s also The Science Fiction Century (ed. David G. Hartwell).
Enhancing Image
Paula Fetts and her son Eddie start out as the only survivors of a crash, and things only get worse from there. Paula is a scientist while Eddie, who must be at least in his twenties despite early descriptions of him (more on this later), is a famous opera singer. As with any mother-son relationship where the former pampers the latter, the son is a little maladjusted. Had Eddie lived in pre-Freudian times he could’ve lived the rest of his life as a shameless mama’s boy, but this is modernity and Farmer knows that such juicy material should not be passed up. Eddie is a bit of a hot mess, but Paula, wanting to stay close to her boy, pulls some strings so that her son can accompany her on this latest expedition to a charted but uncolonized planet, on the basis that Eddie’s expertise in opera could be used to study the form on human colonies. “That the yacht was not visiting any colonized globes seemed to have been missed by the bureaus concerned.” There are sprinkles of humor throughout the story and they’re surprisingly effective. For example, the sheer morbidity of Eddie not liking to clean up the gibbed remains of the crew (quite literally bones and tissue from the impact) because he doesn’t like the sight of blood.
Eddie is, at least symbolically, a child in a man’s body.
The expedition ends before it can even start, with Paula and Eddie being left stranded on the alien planet and with only some portable tech and rations to keep them going. While we’re still at this very early part in the story, before we get to the aliens themselves, I wanna talk about Paula and how interesting she is in terms of her function in the narrative. It was rare for a woman to be the protagonist of an SF story at the time, especially in the adventure mode as with “Mother,” and true enough Paula ends up not filling the protagonist role; she’s undoubtedly smart and competent, but we’re only gonna be in her shoes for a minute before the narrative’s perspective changes profoundly and Paula is, quite intentionally, pushed off-stage. It’s also this opening section that the story is at its most conventional before it goes off the rails (in a good way), with Our Heroes™ using radio to try to find some beacon on the planet; but it’s not too long before they unwittingly get themselves ensnared by the story’s real star.
Eddie and Paula get separated, with the POV now suddenly changing to Eddie’s, with the man-child being trapped in what resembles a huge egg turned on its side, the interior of which feels “soft and yielding—something fleshlike and womanly—almost breastlike in texture and smoothness and warmth, and its hint of gentle curving.” Farmer does not beat around the bush much here. (Also, take a shot every time Farmer uses the word “flesh” and its variants.) At first unsure of his surroundings, Eddie comes to find that he’s inside a very large and very motherly alien, itself unable to move but having tentacles so as to have a good reach both inside and outside. These aliens, which resemble boulders on the outside, hence Our Heroes™ not being aware of their nature at first, are in fact highly intelligent and communicative creatures, with the Mother (with a capital M) Eddie’s inside of even being able to talk to him via Eddie’s radio tech. The Mothers talk in a certain frequency, like they’re FM radio sets, which will prove to bode both good and ill for the humans.
The Mothers are the things on which the story hinges, so let’s talk about them. Often writers struggle (or simply don’t try at all) to create aliens that are not just humanoids with blue skin and funny ears, even though, in terms of probability, we’re far more likely to encounter alien life that’s akin to either starfish or an amoeba. Farmer seemed aware of this from the beginning, as the tragedy of “The Lovers” relies on the alien woman appearing to be more humanoid than she really is; but “Mother” goes a step farther by speculating on how a human might mate with an alien that, while sentient, does not look or behave like a human at all. The Mothers are a single-sex race in that all of the Mothers are female; there are no males of the species—not even disposable things that exist as sperm banks. How do the Mothers reproduce, then? Well, these aliens catch males of other species, only they’re not thought of as males, but as “mobiles.” A mobile, to a Mother, is a male, who will spend time in the egg chamber before getting devoured and released into the environment where the cycle will begin anew. “Mobiles were male. Eddie had been mobile. He was, therefore, a male.” This would intrigue if I found it in a story published in the current year, but for something published seventy years ago it’s kind of astonishing.
Okay, so Eddie and Paula will at some point get eaten by their Mothers, but think also about how I said that the Mothers aren’t exactly discerning about what is male and female. Paula is being kept in a fellow Mother and is apparently acting as that Mother’s mate, but while this can be construed as lesbianism on the Mother’s part, the Mother does not register Paula as being female. It’s almost like gender lines are blurry or something. That Farmer was messing around with this in 1953 should earn him a medal (it did get him a Hugo), but that he did so while showing that in only a matter of months he had matured as a storyteller gets him my respect. “Mother” is a novelette, nearly twenty magazine pages, but it feels shorter somehow, even though there’s little action once Eddie gets trapped inside the Mother. The degree to which Farmer explores the alien mindset of the Mothers while also injecting this with humor is admirable.
There Be Spoilers Here
Eddie has spent enough time in the Mother by now that he’s almost become accustomed to it; he has even given his Mother a name, Polyphema, as a sort of mythology gag. Eddie and Polyphema are able to understand each other somewhat, but there were still the problems of a) contacting Paula, and b) escaping. The first gets solved when Eddie’s able to negotiate with Polyphema and talk with Paula from across the aisle, so to speak. While the humans will eventually be eaten as Nature demands, being “semantic” mobiles (in that they’re able to talk with their Mothers) gives their respective Mothers significant prestige among their peers. (Again, while the Mothers are unable to move, they can communicate across considerable distances, and are thus quite talkative, even catty at times.) Paula has a plan to get out of her own Mother (she has no qualms about killing an intelligent alien being that is simply acting according to its nature) soon enough, but Eddie still has to figure a way to get away from Polyphema.
Unfortunately for everyone a bit of miscommunication comes in to deprive of us a happy (i.e., boring) ending. Without thinking Eddie tells Polyphema that Paula, the mobile in the neighboring Mother, is his mother. The mobile is herself female, which strikes Polyphema as a paradox. “Her world was split into two: mobile and her kind, the immoble. Mobile meant food and mating. Mobile meant—male. The Mothers were—female.” When Paula does come Eddie’s way, Polyphema takes her and devours her almost instantly, in which has to be the story’s most shocking moment—even if I anticipated something like this happening. What shocked me even more was the very dark joke to follow Paula’s death, which actually had me cackling a bit. I’m not gonna say it here because it would feel ruined without the proper buildup, but when you see you might feel compelled to do a double take. Farmer can be a real comedian when he feels like it.
Having lost his real mother, and without any chance of escape, let alone finding civilization again, something strange happens to Eddie: he starts to regress, not just mentally but even physically. The longer Eddie stays with the Sluggos (i.e., the pups, who will one day become Mothers themselves) in Polyphema’s sack the more alien he becomes.
He was, in a sense, their father. Indeed, as they grew to hog-size, it was hard for their female parent to distinguish him from her young. As he seldom walked any more, and was often to be found on hands and knees in their midst, she could not scan him too well. Moreover, something in the heavywet air or in the diet had caused every hair on his body to drop off. He grew very fat. Generally speaking, he was one with the pale, soft, round, and bald offspring. A family likeness.
At the beginning of the story a nearby clock goes backwards in time when the ship crashes—doesn’t stop, but goes back. Farmer brings back this little nugget of symbolism at the end when Eddie, having seemingly met the end of his tether, goes back in time in nearly every way possible—back, even, to being like an infant in his mother’s womb. I knew in advance that “Mother” would end with the human protagonist inside an alien womb, in a Freudian returning-to-the-womb bit, but having actually read it now, the context makes the ending much more effective; it even becomes eerie, although given the alternatives the ending could be worse for Eddie. While having lost his real mother, Eddie is able to leave behind the psychic trauma of human adulthood and will probably now spend the rest of his days in the care of an alien surrogate—one who also happens to be the mother of his children. And they say old SF is unsophisticated.
A Step Farther Out
“Mother” feels like a breath of fresh air especially after the last Farmer story I had read, which was “Don’t Wash the Carats,” a New Wave-era story from one of those goddamn Orbit volumes that I found nigh unreadable hippie garbage. I’m not against hippie-dippy literature and I’m not even against Farmer when he does it necessarily, being one of the few people in the world who likes “Riders of the Purple Wage,” but I just like my literature to read like it was deliberately constructed. Not only is “Mother” deliberately constructed but it shows that Farmer was on to some weird shit at a time when most genre authors were playing by the old rules. Its style is pulpy, yes, but it’s clearly written in the adventure mode so as to more effectively subvert expectations we have about old-school first contact narratives. Tts subject matter also points toward a grand liberalization of the field that had neither a name nor a shape yet… but it was on its way.
(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Weird Tales, March 1953.)
Who Goes There?
When it comes to authors I’ve never read before I always feel a bit nervous when writing this section, because I have to give some context for an artist whose work I have next to no context for. This was not even gonna be my first Mary Elizabeth Counselman story, as I had planned at some point to cover her back in March as part of my Weird Tales tribute, but plans change and now I can’t even remember who I replaced her with. It’s a shame, because while she doesn’t get brought up as nearly as often as H. P. Lovecraft or even C. L. Moore, Counselman was clearly loyal to Weird Tales in its first incarnation, continuing to get published in it up to the bitter end. Doubly a shame because the first Counselman story I ended up reading, todays’ pick, is rather dull, and I don’t have much to say about it—although there are a few points of interest I’ll be sure to write about here. What the hell, I’m not getting paid to do any of this, and this work will not redeem me, nor will it probably turn me into a more understanding person.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. I was surprised to find “Night Court” has been reprinted several times, most notably in Witches’ Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women (ed. Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini) and Great American Ghost Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Frank D. McSherry, and Charles G. Waugh). It’s definitely a ghost story, but I wouldn’t call it great.
Enhancing Image
We follow Bob: Korean War veteran, 22-year-old husband-to-be, mostly upstanding citizen, and a bit of an asshole. Bob has the very bad habit of reckless driving—not road rage exactly, but an immense carelessness that, we’re told, has gotten him into big trouble a couple times already. If not for a certain family connection in the local legal system Bob would probably be seeing jail time, but thanks to a powerful uncle he just once again got no more than a slap on the wrist for running over an elderly black man (these are not the words used in-story, mind you). Unluckily for Bob, but perhaps for future potentials victims of his behavior on the road, Bob is about to take a detour against his will… into the Twilight Zone.
Jokes aside, this does read like it could be adapted (and perhaps elevated) into a classic Twilight Zone episode, although more because of its structure and moralism than the quality of the thing. Bob is a one-note character, a good-for-nothing who exists in the context of the story to be taught a lesson, but even so there are a couple things about him that struck me. For one, I’ve read a good deal of ’50s SFF at this point, and shockingly little of what I’ve read directly mentions the Korean War; indeed the only SFF author I can think of off the top of my head who’s a Korean War veteran would be Jerry Pournelle. Mind you that the cease fire would not be declared until several months after “Night Court” was published, so this was very much an ongoing conflict when Counselman wrote it. Also, making the villain protagonist of your story a military veteran pre-Vietnam is certainly a choice. Bob talks about how he’s supposedly a hero for “killing fourteen North Koreans” but is labeled a hazard for accidentally killing a couple people on the road. He may have PTSD, but this is sadly not elaborated upon.
After seemingly having run over a little girl whilst rushing to meet up with his fiancée, Bob gets pulled over by a highway patrolman—only this is not a normal man, going by appearances, his thick goggles obscuring his eyes but also giving him an almost skeletal look. “Bob squirmed under the scrutiny of eyes hidden behind the green glass; saw the lips move… and noticed, for the first time, how queerly the traffic officer held his head.” The officer’s neck is craned as if it had been broken or mangled, yet surely the officer still lives. Things only get weirder (although not that weird) when the officer, ignoring the girl under Bob’s car, takes Bob in to be judged at the night court—which is like normal court but sPoOoOoKy. We have, by this point, pretty thoroughly left the confines of everyday reality, hence the Twilight Zone comparison, although once I realized what kind of story this was I have to admit my mind sort of went on autopilot from hereon out.
I knew nothing about “Night Court” going into it other than that it would be a tale of the supernatural, entailing some kind of judgment, and these were not incorrect assumptions! Unfortunately what I got was also a PSA on how you should watch where you’re going on the road, and it’s like… I get it, this was back before we even had seat belt laws; cars were little more than metal death traps. At the same time, I’m legally blind, so I don’t have a driver’s license, let alone a car myself. You may recall in high school how you were taught about the perils of drunk driving and texting on your phone while driving, that sort of thing. As someone who is faaaaaaaar more likely to be the victim of a hit-and-run than a perpetrator, I feel qualified to say that while this is an important lesson to learn when you’re young in the real world, it does not make for compelling storytelling. We learn that the people overseeing Bob’s trial in the night court are all victims of auto accidents, including the old man he had recently killed, and I get that this makes sense—I just don’t find it that interesting or worthy of study.
In 1953 this was probably seen as more necessary to get across in writing, but after decades of TV PSAs I think we’ve moved well past the point where a story like “Night Court” feels worthy of note.
There Be Spoilers Here
I will say, though, that the twist was not one I was expecting. You would expect the girl Bob had run over to appear at the night court as his most recent victim, but actually the girl does not exist—yet. The judge says that the girl will be born years from now, and if Bob doesn’t change his ways then he will kill this girl somewhere down the line. This gets a single golf clap from me. Less interesting is that said girl is implied to be Bob’s future daughter at the very end, which I don’t think is a necessary touch. I was expecting the story to end in a more predictable but tragically ironic way, like Bob promising to better himself only to get killed in an accident by another reckless driver, but the ending we got was anti-climatic by comparison; not as predictable, true, but it also left me feeling a little empty. Maybe Counselman had become weary of conventional twist endings? I would’ve gone for something more gruesome is what I’m saying.
A Step Farther Out
Not that all ghost stories have to be scary, but when I’m reading one I expect to feel something in connection with the supernatural; not always fear, but often an uncertainty, a sense of mystery at the unexplainable. The Turn of the Screw is not what I would call scary, but it is effective and memorable as a psychological study and as an extended metaphor—a metaphor for what we’re not so sure about. For “Night Court” I felt either detached or a little annoyed at the preachiness of it, which strikes me as old-timey even for 1953. It’s not scary or eerie, certainly, but it also reads like Counselman is wagging her finger at the reader and expecting us to take an important life lesson away from it. I usually don’t like moralism in my fiction (which is funny, given I’m a big Twilight Zone fan), but I’m willing to forgive that if the message is given a humane (not to say delicate) touch—only “Night Court” is not in touch with what I would call the pains of the human condition.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 