Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Serial Review: Destiny Times Three by Fritz Leiber (Part 1/2)

December 6th, 2022

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

Who Goes There?

Fritz Leiber spent the first phase of his career, from about 1939 to 1945, mostly published in Weird Tales and Unknown, and more precariously in Astounding Science Fiction. I say “more precariously” because Leiber, at least early in his career, was not too keen on science-fictional writing; he would write some stone-cold SF classics like “Coming Attraction” and “A Pail of Air,” but that was later. Destiny Times Three was Leiber’s third novel, and it basically closed out the first phase of his career, in that while he continued to write in the latter half of the ’40s, his output was more sporadic, and evidently he struggled to find outlets for his material. Serialized in two parts, this is very much a short novel, but as we’ll see it packs quite a punch. It was nominated for a Retro Hugo for Best Novel.

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 was published in the March 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Time has not been very good to this novel in terms of publication. It did not see print in book form until the anthology Five Science Fiction Novels in 1952, from Gnome Press, edited by Martin Greenberg (not to be confused with Martin H. Greenberg, not that I would ever make such a mistake). Five years later and it finally got a solo book release, as part of the Galaxy Science Fiction Novel series. Things went dark for a while and in 1978 it reappeared as one half of Binary Star No. 1, the other half being Norman Spinrad’s “Riding the Torch.” Apparently there are hardcover and paperback editions of the novel by itself from Wildside Press, but I’m not sure where you would find these. Destiny Times Three has the misfortune of being too short a novel (it’s arguably a novella) to easily justify printing on its own, but it’s also too long to be anthologized, especially in the current market. Your best bet might just be the serial version.

Enhancing Image

We start with Thorn, a psychologist, accidentally stealing an object which he struggles to describe and whose possession he finds inexplicable. “It was about two inches in diameter and of a bafflingly gray texture, neither a gem, nor a metal, nor a stone, nor an egg, though faintly suggestive of all four.” If it sounds like I’m just tossing you into the middle of things without explaining who Thorn is, or what it is he stole, or from whom he was taking it, that’s because Leiber does the same thing. Admittedly Destiny Times Three does not start on the best foot; indeed I’d say it starts out pretty confusing and gets gradually more understandable as it goes on, which I suspect was by design, but it also means quite a few readers are gonna bounce off the opening chapters. We’re given no context at the outset what kind of world Thorn lives in, which is important because it’s clearly not our world. As such I’ll have to tackle this synopsis shindig a bit differently from the usual.

The plot centers around Thorn and Clawly, lifelong friends and colleagues who study people’s dreams, as you do. Something they’ve noticed lately is that people seem to be having far more nightmares than to be expected, and what’s far weirder is that these people have amnesiac episodes in which they don’t remember or recognize the people in their lives. The amnesiac episodes are temporary, but still, there are too many of these cases to be ignored. It looks like there be trouble in paradise. Thorn and Clawly live in what could be called a better alternative to our world, being a world apparently free from mass starvation and war, along with top-down tyranny, despite the presence of what is called the World Executive Committee. The World Executive Committee is basically like if the UN actually did its job, and curiously this novel was serialized mere months prior to the UN’s founding.

I would say Leiber’s expectations of a world government were too optimistic, but this was also the same period when Robert Heinlein, during his flaming liberal phase, would have more or less agreed with such optimism.

This utopia is called the Dawn Civilization, but for reasons to be given later I’ll refer to it from now on as World I (mind the Roman numeral). What makes it such a smashing civilization is apparently the wide availability of what Leiber calls subtronic power, which is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread and whose accessibility has allowed for a technological and political Good Future™. I don’t know what subtronic power is exactly, because Leiber doesn’t really bother to explain it, but it’s obviously supposed to be analogous with atomic power. So-called Golden Age SF can be broken into two groups: pre-Hiroshima and post-Hiroshima. A good deal of pre-Hiroshima SF was about the potential greatness of atomic power, whereas post-Hiroshima SF was concerned about its potential as a weapon, though there are exceptions; you can guess which group Destiny Times Three falls into. I have to wonder if Leiber would’ve made a thinly veiled substitute for atomic power the great tech of the novel had he written it even one year later.

So, Thorn has a mysterious object which naturally unbeknownst to him has more power than he is aware of, and Clawly is driven to desperation after failing to convince the World Executive Commitee that these bizarre psychological episodes have any tangible importance. Clawly goes to see Oktav, an oracle, about what to do about what he suspects to be attempts by some outside force to invade the Dawn Civilziation, though Oktav knows a lot more than what he tells the poor psychologist. You see, Clawly theorizes that when people have these memory lapses that they’re not actually losing their memories, but that their minds are being displaced—put elsewhere and replaced by something. It sounds outlandish and you can see why the higher-ups scoff at him, but if you’ve read the script like Clawly did then you would reach similar conclusions.

So he tells the World Executive Committee:

“It is my contention—I might as well put it in plain words—that alien minds are displacing the minds of our citizens, that they are infiltering Earth, seeking to gain a foothold here. As to what minds they are, where they come from—I can’t answer that, except to remind you that Thorn’s studies of dream landscapes hint at a world strangely like our own, though strangely distorted. But the secrecy of the invaders implies that their purpose is hostile—at best, suspect. And I need not remind you that, in this age of subtronic power, the presence of even a tiny hostile group could become a threat to Earth’s very existence.”

Meanwhile, Thorn experiences what can only be called a waking nightmare—a surreal passage that stands out as one of Part 1’s highlights, and a typically excellent bit of prose for Leiber. Of course it’s not just a nightmare: something is happening to Thorn, though he doesn’t realize it right away. Soon he finds himself in a place he doesn’t recognize, in a body which is still his but which at the same time he feels to be alien somehow, and that’s only the start of his troubles. Could it have something to do with the object he stole without remembering why he did that? Does it have to do with a possible mental invasion that Clawly has been talking about? Yes to both, but how exactly is left up to spoilers.

I’ll say here that I went into Destiny Times Three thinking it would be a time travel narrative, which it isn’t really; it involves multiple timelines but they’re more like alternate realities. That’s right, we’re dealing with a multiverse story, and from 1945! Despite it’s brevity, this baby is dense, not just with action but also with ideas, and while details do clear up as we understand more about the workings of World I, the significance of the object Thorn took (it’s actually called a talisman) and so forth, you might have to reread a few passages to get what’s going on. Leiber would venture into equally if not even more high-concept territory later in his career, such as his Change War series, but Destiny Times Three might be his most ambitious work up to this point, though I have to admit I’ve not read his earlier SF novel Gather, Darkness! Safe to say Leiber is pushing himself into new territory here.

A few criticisms at the end of this section…

If you’re expecting women to play any significant roles in this novel, too bad, at least for Part 1. There’s a very minor female character (I don’t think she even has a name) who shows up once and is never seen again, and all the characters who matter are manly men of action. I’m trying to remember where exactly this was, but I recall Leiber years later saying he regretted not giving women a bigger role in the narrative for this specific novel. If you’re looking for a character-focused work then you’ll also be disappointed, as Destiny Times Three is driven by action and ideas; it’s a wild ride that only gets wilder as it goes on, but it’s not psychologically complicated. I would say, however, that Leiber is chasing after a vision that is quite astounding (haha, I know) given how short the novel is, and if he was pressured to keep it brief for magazine publication then oh well, that’s how life is.

There Be Spoilers Here

Thorn has swapped minds with someone who both is and is not himself. Whereas Thorn is a law-abiding psychologist, Thorn II (the man whose body he now occupies) is a rebel, and he needs to be a rebel because the Bad Future™of World II is run by a tyrannical world government (as opposed to the good world government). Clawly II himself is a member of said big bad government, which complicates things when Thorn crosses paths with this alternate version of his best friend.

How did we get here? Not just the swapping of minds but the fact that there’s more than one reality. Going back to subtronic power, there are apparently three timelines which diverge depending on what the leaders of the world do with this new discovery that could shape the future of mankind. In World I, deemed “the best” timeline, subtronic power was made accessible to the public; in World II, it’s held hostage by what is now a fascist world government; in World III, the discovery of subtronic power is totally suppressed. We don’t meet anyone from World III—at least not yet; but World II is basically the antagonist of the novel, as we find out its government is plotting an invasion of World I. Yet there is an even greater discover than subtronic power, one which makes such an invasion even possible: the Probability Engine. Placed outside space and time, the Probability Engine is maintained by a council of experimenters, of which Oktav is a member, and it was Oktav’s talisman which Thorn had taken.

The Probability Engine was probably invented by a third party (let’s face it, it’s either aliens or far-future humans), and it has the power to create (and, conversely, destroy) alternate timelines; at least that’s how I understand it. For the purposes of the novel there are three timelines, though at least for now only two are important. Rather than jump across timelines via portals or a time machine, one’s mind is swapped with his/her counterpart’s, which kinda… reminds me of a certain movie. To be fair, I’m pretty sure the Daniels have never even heard of Destiny Times Three, but it just goes to show that these “nifty sci-fi ideas” are usually really fucking old and that nothing is original. And also Santa Claus isn’t real.

A gripe I often have with multiverse stories is that when we see someone’s alternate selves they’re too closely related, despite the fact that you’d probably turn out a different person if your parents conceived on this day instead the other day, never mind all these other factors. I even criticized Sarah Pinsker’s otherwise pretty enjoyable novella “And Then There Were (N-One)” for having dozens of different versions of herself (it’s that kind of story) that are not that different. Even Everything Everywhere All At Once, great a movie as it is, does not go far enough with presenting just how radically different multiple versions of yourself would be; we never, for instance, see a male version of Michelle Yeoh’s character, even though that seems highly likely to occur. Leiber dodges this gripe by having the big change occur after Thorn, Clawly, and the other major characters were already born, so they have the same physiologies, names, and even some of the same childhood experiences.

The question is, how do you fight an invasion of minds? How do you fight against an army when it’s an army of body snatchers? How do you protect your mind from being swapped with that of your counterpart’s? You’ll just have to wait a bit.

A Step Farther Out

Part of me feels that Leiber originally conceived Destiny Times Three as a fantasy, since it almost leans closer to that than SF. The council of experimenters are like sorcerers. Subtronic power may as well be magic. Yet given the lack of a viable market for fantasy, especially of this length, in 1945, I wouldn’t be surprised if Leiber tinkered with it enough to make it SF. Not much of a criticism, really. At the risk of sounding immature, Destiny Times Three works because it is so COOL. The notion of an invasion not happening through some portal or gateway or a time machine, but through our minds, is COOL. The notion that all it takes is one invention to change not just society at large but people’s individual personalities is COOL. So far we’ve only seen World I and II, but the possibility of encountering that third world (which does not sound like a picnic) and having all three intersect is COOL. It’s a cool novel, and I hope it only ramps up in Part 2.

I also have to wonder if Leiber had been reading any A. E. van Vogt and what he thought of it, because Destiny Times Three strikes me as conspicuously van Vogt-esque, for both good and ill. This is Leiber at his least lucid (now doesn’t that phrase roll off the tongue), and I certainly wish he could explain himself better here, something he normally does with elegance. But also like van Vogt, the vision is so grand, so close to the transcendent, that it almost feels religious despite being undeniably secular. It’s like a cosmic epic in miniature, and I’m here for it.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Scylla’s Daughter” by Fritz Leiber

December 3rd, 2022

(Cover by Vernon Kramer. Fantastic, May 1961.)

Who Goes There?

Fritz Leiber, after a hiatus in the ’50s, returned in full force at the end of that decade, in no small part due to new management over at Fantastic and Amazing Stories. Cele Goldsmith doesn’t get brought up much when talking about great magazine editors, but she really should be; she not only made Fantastic a viable outlet for short fantasy, she all but singlehandedly revived Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series. For the November 1959 issue of Fantastic all the fiction pieces were by Leiber, in a special Leiber tribute, and we also got “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” the first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story in six years. From then on we would get at least one Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story in Fantastic every year until 1965, when Goldsmith stepped down. While Leiber stayed consistently productive with other things after Goldsmith left, it would take him a few years to return to the series that now stands as his most lasting achievement.

For some context: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are a barbarian and thief duo who take on odd jobs for fun and profit in the secondary world of Nehwon, and most often the city of Lankhmar. “Scylla’s Daughter,” however, does not take place in Lankhmar, but on the high seas. This is like my eighth or nineth story from the series—I’ve lost count a bit. “Scylla’s Daughter” garnered a Hugo nomination for Best Short Fiction (the Best Novella category did not exist yet), and would serve as the base for The Swords of Lankhmar.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1961 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. Despite the Hugo nomination, “Scylla’s Daughter” has been reprinted a grand total of two times, first in the fantasy anthology Barbarians, edited by Robert Adams, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, which seems to have been printed only once; the second is Modern Classics of Fantasy, edited by Gardner Dozois, which is a beefier anthology and which is easy enough to find used. While it does feel weird for this novella to have appeared so rarely, it did get expanded into the sole Fafhrd and Gray Mouser novel, The Swords of Lankhmar, in 1968, which I suppose rendered “Scylla’s Daughter” both obsolete and non-canon. Sometimes you get novellas which, when expanded into novels, stand well apart from their novel counterparts, but this is not one of those times.

Enhancing Image

We start on the Squid, a grain ship that’s moving as part of a fleet from Lankhmar to a neighboring city. If you think we’re gonna get off the Squid and hit land at some point, think again: this story is entirely seafaring. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser have been recruited basically as mercenaries for the fleet, and the fleet is gonna need some manpower considering a) it’s a trading fleet with quite a bit of booty worth stealing, and b) the previous fleets sent on this trade deal never returned, which is a bit ominous. Admittedly a government, even in Fantasy Land, hiring Fafhrd and the Mouser to guard a grain ship would be like if the Japanese government hired Lupin III and Jigen as bank security. That’s fine, it’s all in good fun. But why are we here? What kind of arrangement is this?

Thankfully the Mouser, being a cunning prick, is fluent in Expositionese, and lets us in on the situation:

“This fleet bears a gift of grain from Overlord Glipkerio to Movarl of the Eight Cities in gratitude for Movarl’s sweeping the Mingol pirates from the Inner Sea and mayhap diverting the steppe-dwelling Mingols from assaulting Lankhmar across the Sinking Land. Movarl needs grain for his hunter-farmers turned cityman-soldiers and especially to supply his army relieving his border city of Klelg Nar, which the Mingols besiege. Fafhrd and I are, you might say, a small but mighty rear-guard for the grain and for certain more delicate items of Glipkerio’s gift.”

The “more delicate items” are supposed at first to be some animals onboard: a dozen white rats that are really big and are allegedly really intelligent. The real gift, however, aside from the grain, might be Hisvet, a demoiselle (a young noblewoman) and fellow passenger on the Squid. Hisvet is quite beautiful, so beautiful that she soon drives Fafhrd and the Mouser to the depths of simpery—which they may or may not regret down the road. Hisvet has a peculiar relationship with rats in general, and she has a special connection with the dozen white rats in particular, which at first sounds innocuous.

There’s a pretty funny scene where the Mouser and Hisvet are tasting plums and tossing them overboard one after another. “A shark following in the wake of the Squid got a stomachache.” In general this is a pretty funny novella, especially in the first half before things get serious, and it demonstrates Leiber’s lively sense of humor that sometimes worked in tandem with his sense of horror. Indeed “Scylla’s Daughter” could almost be considered a horror-comedy, between Fafhrd and the Mouser’s rom-com shenanigans with Hisvet and the somewhat foreboding setting, with these ships at sea in an area that is supposedly haunted by shipwrecks—not accidental shipwrecks even, but plunderings and sabotages.

The word of the day is “rat.” We’re talking literal rats and also rats in the metaphorical sense, between the rats onboard and, for instance, the Mouser’s willingness to screw over Fafhrd if it means getting closer to Hisvet. We know that Our Anti-Heroes™ that are gonna make it to the end in one piece, but what was being bought and at what cost? That I’ll leave for the spoilers section, but I’ll say that if you’re familiar with how the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series works even a little bit then you’ll figure that the love triangle at the story’s center will have to be broken somehow. Complicating things is Frix, Hisvet’s devoted maid, with whom she has a rather, hmm, odd relationship (put a pin in that one). Also complicating things is that rats have been known to sink ships (gnawing through wood and rope and all that), and nobody on the Squid is keen on having the white rats aboard.

At one point, in what is kind of a surreal episode, the fleet crosses paths with someone who quite literally seems to have come from nowhere, a German adventurer named Karl Treuherz. If you’ve been wondering as to how the cover on this issue of Fantastic relates to “Scylla’s Daughter,” that’s Karl on top of his two-headed sea serpent. We even get talk of Homer’s Odyssey and the original Scylla, a six-headed sea dragon, although this raises the question of how Karl could know about Homer or anything from our well. After all, Nehwon is a secondary world; it does not share history with Earth. Well, Karl isn’t from Nehwon; he can travel between different worlds. This is a bit much to put on the reader in the middle of a seafaring adventure, even if “Scylla’s Daughter” is a relatively late entry in the series. Karl also has some lines in German, but conveniently those all get translated via humorous footnotes.

What does Karl have to do with the plot, though? He talks with Fafhrd for a bit and then fucks off. Well, his two-headed serpent does have an appetite for rats, so just keep that in mind…

Karl also very much acts as a red herring, and a pretty obvious one. On the morning after Fafhrd’s meeting with Karl, one of the fleet’s ships is discovered to have been sunk. Some suspect that Hisvet may have ordered rats to sink the ship, given her kinship with rats and a superstition that there may be a cult of hyper-intelligent rats—an accusation which Fafhrd and the Mouser, of course, try to rebuke. Hisvet claims that Karl and his two-headed serpent had sunk the ship, which is convenient but also not very convincing if you think about it. Up to this point Hisvet has been a somewhat passive character in the whole equation, but the Karl episode prompts her to take a more active (and more foreboding) role. It could be that something else had sunk the ship, or maybe Hisvet now acting so suspicious is a sign that she knows more about rats than she lets on.

One last thing I wanna mention before we get into the meaty spoilers is a walking bit of irony: a black cat that’s also on the Squid. There are sveeral scenes where Fafhrd tries to get along with the cat, only for it to bite/scratch him for his troubles. The cat (as is to be expected) also does not get along with rats at all, and his aversion to Hisvet is some heavy-handed foreshadowing that Hisvet is not all she claims to be. Yet the cat’s violent attitude toward Fafhrd also pushes him more in Hisvet’s direction, making him believe her more whereas otherwise he might be more skeptical. “‘I forswear all cats!’ Fafhrd cried angrily, dabbling at his chin. ‘Henceforth rats are my favorite beasties.’” And boy won’t he eat those words.

There Be Spoilers Here

An important lesson to take from this is that you should never ditch your buddy for a girlboss. Ya know, bros before hoes. Hisvet probably does have a soft spot for Fafhrd and the Mouser, but that doesn’t stop her from drugging them so that they’ll be out of the way while she starts working her magic with the white rats. Something funny about the rats is that we’re told they’re intelligent, but the twist is just how intelligent: they’re able to follow orders and wield tiny swords, with little hats to match! The leader of the white rats, and basically Hisvet’s second in command, is named Skwee, and isn’t that a cute name for a villain. It’s silly, undeniably, like something out of an old animated Disney film, but I’m pretty sure Leiber intended that silliness; I wouldn’t be surprised if he was thinking of Pinocchio or Peter Pan when he wrote “Scylla’s Daughter.” Some Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories have a creature feature feel about them and this is one such example.

Something that really jumped out at me in this story’s climax is the lesbianism, which is more than implied but less than said. What, lesbianism? In a magazine fantasy story from 1961? It’s more likely than you think! I’ve seen homosexuality get brought up in older magazine SFF, but not this directly or positively. To be more specific, not only are Hisvet and Frix in cahoots (not surprising), but they’re also all but said to be lovers (a little surprising), what with Hisvet not only kissing Frix, who then kisses Fafhrd (Hisvet kissing Fafhrd by proxy), but Hisvet admits later that men and women have fallen for her before and that she knows how devoted Frix is. Curiously, Leiber does not Bury Your Gays™, at least not here; once Karl shows up again and starts wreaking havoc on the rats, Hisvet and Frix hightail it off the Squid. Ya know what, good for them; I wonder what will happen to them in the novel version.

I suppose I have two issues with the ending: the first is that Karl appearing again reeks of deus ex machina, with Fafhrd and the Mouser actually doing very little to fight the rats, and the second is that even if I didn’t know about The Swords of Lankhmar I would’ve guessed we got a sequel to this. Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories typically read as standalones, but “Scylla’s Daughter” ends on a bit of a sequel hook, what with Hisvet and Frix getting away at the end, and we did sort of get a sequel in the form of expansion, but I prefer my stories in this series to be more tightly knit. This is gonna sound silly, but we could’ve also used more bromance between Fafhrd and the Mouser; these stories tend to be at their best when Our Anti-Heroes™ are working together, and in “Scylla’s Daughter” they’re usually not interacting with each other or they’re falling over each other’s dicks for Hisvet.

A Step Farther Out

It’s not what I would recommend as one’s first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story, but “Scylla’s Daughter” has all the qualities of what I’d consider a good entry in the series: humor, terror, an engaging love interest, more than a touch of weirdness, and of course good swashbuckling adventure. What always brings me back to the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series is not just Leiber’s borderline poetic and often lively prose, or even the thrills of the adventures themselves, but the overwhelming friendship between these two guys that keeps them together for decades, but in-story and throughout Leiber’s career. Not enough fiction, in my opinion, does platonic friendship between men well or convincingly (too often it reads as subliminally romantic), and yet Fafhrd and the Mouser stay consistent as the two best bros in Lankhmar. I cannot imagine these guys screwing each other or wanting to screw, although they would certainly go on double dates. I like this series a lot because even though Fafhrd and the Mouser get themselves into some shit, they always get out of it, and they always do that by sticking together.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: December 2022

December 1st, 2022
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, July 1969.)

It’s that special time of year, and I’m not just saying that because it’s Christmastime. Truth be told, I’m not crazy about Christmas; I certainly don’t go nuts over it like I do with Halloween—which is why my review roster for this month is not Christmas-themed. My birthday is also this month (it’s the 9th, if you’d like to know), but that’s not why I’m here. Some months thing will be totally normal, but then there are times like this. Oh, we still have the usual rotation, albeit with a little twist (in fact it’s a new department), which I’ll get to in a minute. The real twist is that this will be a single-author lineup, and the guest of honor is Fritz Leiber.

Fritz Leiber was born on Christmas Eve, 1910, and when he made his professional genre debut in 1939, he was about to mark a new era in fantasy writing—although people were not aware of this at the time. His most lasting achievement is the grand episodic narrative of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, one of fantasy’s most daring duos and a landmark in what is now called Sword and Sorcery (the same subgenre which contains Robert E. Howard’s Conan, among other things). Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are by no means his only contribution to the genre, and indeed his turf goes far beyond just fantasy. You know, I really like Leiber, but even with most of my favorite authors I would not dedicate a whole month to reviewing works of theirs; what makes Leiber different from most is his ability to dabble in basically everything, from fantasy to horror to science fiction. Across the half-century of his career, Leiber shfited from genre to genre, mood to mood, not being as easy to pin down as most of his contemporaries.

Since this is a bit of an unusual month for reviews, I decided to go an extra step and introduce another new department—albeit an irregular one. There aren’t too many of them, but there are in fact “complete” novels in the magazines, especially in the ’40s and ’50s. Or rather were, because magazines running novels was basically an attempt to keep paperbacks (which were gaining traction) from biting their heels, an attempt which ultimately and inevitably proved a failure. A lot of “complete” novels being run in magazineare also just novellas, but there are exceptions! Leiber’s 1950 novel You’re All Alone is one such exception, and while it is technically an abridged version of The Sinful Ones (long story), at 40,000 words it’s a bit too long to be comfortably called a novella, at least for my blog. I’ll explain how this new thing will work at the end.

So, we get two serials, two novellas, two short stories, and a complete novel in honoring this bastard. Not the last time I’ll be doing this single-author month deal, but obviously it’s something I’ll only do maybe once a year. But enough! It’s time to reveal what we’ll be reading.

The serials:
1. Destiny Times Three, first published in the March to April 1945 issues of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novel. Not one of Leiber’s more famous works, if the number of times it’s been reprinted says anything, but then it is quite a short novel—probably too short to sell on its own but also too long to be anthologized easily. One of Leiber’s earliest attempts at depicting alternate timelines, a premise that he would return to fruitfully much later.
2. Rime Isle, first published in the May to July 1977 issues of Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy. Never heard of Cosmos? Don’t worry, it only lasted four issues. Rime Isle is part of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, being a later entry, as well as one of Leiber’s final appearances in the magazines; thereafter he stuck to original anthologies. Whereas some other Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories are often cited, this is not one of them. I know basically nothing about it.
The novellas:
1. “Scylla’s Daughter,” from the May 1961 issue of Fantastic. The late ’50s saw a major revival for the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, which was not coincidental considering Fantastic‘s new editor, Cele Goldsmith, clearly sympathized with Leiber and wanted to buy what he was selling, with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser getting at least one story a year in that magazine until Goldsmith left. “Scylla’s Daughter” would later be expanded into The Swords of Lankhmar.
2. “Ship of Shadows,” from the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This is a special issue of F&SF, being one of its author tribute issues, with “Ship of Shadows” as the lead novella. Technically a reread, but it’s been long enough that I could use a refresher, and hell, I remember liking it quite a bit. Leiber stories tend to fall into SF, fantasy, or horror, but “Ship of Shadows” ticks all three boxes, and it won a Hugo while it was at it!
The short stories:
1. “The Hound,” from the November 1942 issue of Weird Tales. The first several years of Leiber’s career saw him dwell primarily in Weird Tales and Unknown, the top fantasy-horror magazines of the early ’40s. Not being the most comfortable with SF, Leiber distinguished himself at first as a young master of terror and the supernatural. “The Hound” is one such early horror effort from Leiber, and hey, it’s apparently a werewolf story, and I love me some werewolves.
2. “The Moon Is Green,” from the April 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. After being relatively inative in the late ’40s, Leiber came back strong early the next decade, and his return to the field coincided with those explosive first years of Galaxy, the new SF magazine on the market. Leiber became one of Galaxy‘s leading writers in the early ’50s, and “The Moon Is Green” is one of those Galaxy-Leiber tales to get adapted for the legendary X Minus One.
Now, finally, the complete novel:
1. You’re All Alone, from the July 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures. Apparently the magazine version is an earlier draft that Leiber had tried but failed to get published, since the fantasy market in the latter half of the ’40s was in the dumps, but luckily Fantastic Adventures, previously a second-rate pulp outlet, was under new management. Leiber would then “expand” the novel for book publication under the title The Sinful Ones, but from what I’ve heard the magazine version is better.
About how these complete novel reviews will work. My review schedule is on a rotation basis, switching between short stories, novellas, and serials; depending on how many days there are in a month I would cram in a third novella or short story. The way I have it figured is, if a month has 31 days, and if I’m set to review a novella on the 31st day, I’ll switch that would-be novella out for a complete novel. After all, I wanna save the biggest single review project for last, and I wanna give myself enough time to really digest the extra long material. The resulting review will itself of course be longer than average. Now, how do I separate a complete novel from a novella? How does one tell the difference, especially since magazines, while usually two-columned, have different type sizes and therefore some can pack more wordage into each page? Sometimes magazines give rough word counts, but much of this, admittedly, will come down to my own discretion.

Not making promises, but complete novel reviews will probably be the last department I add to my blog. This is a one-man show, ya know, and I do have a day job to contend with. Still, I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t out of passive, and you also know that I’m a compulsive reader. The more the merrier! Just hope I can do someone as great as Leiber justice with this.

Won’t you read with me?
Serial Review: We Have Fed Our Sea by Poul Anderson (Part 2/2)

November 27th, 2022

(Cover by Martinez. Astounding, September 1958.)

Who Goes There?

Poul Anderson is a semi-obscure name in the field nowadays, which is weird because there was a time when, evidently, he was considered a big fucking deal. From his genre debut in 1947 to his death in 2001, Anderson was one of the real vanguards of 20th century American SF, though unlike contemporaries like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein he showed himself to be about as proficient writing fantasy as SF. He was also alarmingly prolific, writing non-stop for a good half-century, and as such he doesn’t already hit it out of the park, as it were; the good news is that if you don’t like one Anderson story, there’s at least another that will appeal to you. One possible (read: probable) reason why Anderson’s stature has faded somewhat since his death is that not only did he write a lot, but he also wrote several vast continuities, none of which seemed to be published in internal chronological order. A seemingly standalone short story can turn out to be part of an overarching cycle that Anderson worked on for decades, and the result is that to this day it’s hard to organize his work.

Anderson won seven Hugos and three Nebulas, and he was made an SFWA Grand Master in 1998. His fantasy novels The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions are intriguing and often thrilling examples of “modern” fantasy which were written parallel to The Lord of the Rings. Despite their politics being very much different, Michael Moorcock was apparently inspired by Anderson’s fantasy. The subject of today’s review, We Have Fed Our Sea, however, is decidedly hard SF, and was the first work of Anderson’s to garner a Hugo nomination.

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 was published in the September 1958 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Despite the Hugo nomination and despite being well-liked by Anderson fans, time has not been very kind to We Have Fed Our Sea—by that I mean that this shit has not been in paperback since the ’80s. Oh sure, you could snag a copy, under its book title The Enemy Stars, as an ebook, but 1) it’s an ebook, and 2) it’s published by Open Road Media, the coal in the stockings of naughty children on Christmas morning. Unlike some other Anderson titles, The Enemy Stars doesn’t even have paperback edition from Open Road Media, which may well be for the best, since their paperbacks tend to be depressingly mediocre. Still, I imagine it’s not hard at all to find used copies of The Enemy Stars on eBay for such low prices that the shipping might cost more than the book itself.

Enhancing Image

At the beginning of Part 2, our four crewmen of the Southern Cross have found themselves in quite the pickle. For one, the ship’s ion drive is damaged such that they won’t be able to get into a stable orbit around the black star, and another is that the mattercaster’s web is also damaged enough to be unusable; the second problem is the big one, because if they can’t mattercast then there’s no way of getting back to civilization. The nearest human outpost is tens of lightyears away and the Southern Cross can only travel at a fraction of the speed of light. No FTL ships here! I said this jokingly in my review of Part 1, but I do have to wonder if mattercasting influenced how teleportation works in Star Trek. We even get the “Do we die when we’re teleported?” meme. In the case of We Have Fed Our Sea the answer is actually YES, believe it or not: the main characters are technically clones—not that being clones matters much to them.

The ion drive can be repaired with onboard tools, but the mattercaster will be a tougher nut to crack. The mattercaster web requires a specific metal, germanium, which is not on the ship, but the good news is that the Southern Cross has basic mining equipment and the crew will be able to extract enough germanium from a nearby smoldered planet (a dead planet near a dead sun) to repair the web; the bad news is that they would have to land on said planet, and the Southern Cross was not built to land directly on anything. Some improvisation will be required. Chang Sverdlov, would-be revolutionary and the ship’s engineer, will have to head out into the vacuum of space and see what the deal is, and Seiichi Nakamura, the pilot, will have to maneuver around the black star and find some way to land on a planet containing the germanium they need.

I like how Sverdlov’s rebellious attitude toward the Protectorate comes to nothing, both because of the existential situation the men find themselves in and also because of what happens to Sverdlov.

What starts as a four-man group becomes a dwindling party, and Sverdlov is the first to bite the big bazooka; this happens early enough in Part 2 that I don’t consider it much of a spoiler, at least if you’ve made it this far. Sverdlov suffers a freak accident during his inspection of the ship and dies in the vacuum of space, alone, with only the voices of his fellows as his last connection to humanity. “He stood with ten thousand bitter suns around him; but none were Sol or Tau Ceti. O Polaris, death’s lodestar, are we as little as all that?” The bright side is that Sverdlov’s death is not meaningless, since it’s through his efforts that the other crewmen are able to correct the ship’s trajectory. Sverdlov has the misfortune of being the least developed of the four crewmen, but the arc of his development and his fate are fine encapsulations of the book’s main theme: the insignificance of man when compared to the vast indifference of space.

So, that leaves three men. And it does not take merely a day or two to find the planet for the job, but weeks. Without an endless supply of provisions and without backup. Fortunately for Our Heroes™, water can be recycled on the ship, but unfortunnately food cannot; it’s pointed out, rather morbidly, that at the rate it’s taking to find the planet to mine the geranium, everyone would’ve starved to death had Sverdlov not died first. In this context the individual’s life means next to nothing, and even the collective is overwhelmed by an endless natural world which does give a single shit about human endeavor.

Something you have to understand about Anderson is that, as a rule of thumb, he’s more interested in things that aren’t human than things that are; We Have Fed Our Sea is a human drama, but it would not exist if not for everything surrounding the humans. None of the four crewmen is developed that much outside of the role he plays in relation to The Big Picture™, that being the grand conflict between mankind and space. Take Terangi Maclaren, for instance, who takes on a more active role in Part 2: last we checked he had started to turn toward the solemn and self-loathing, and by now he has become thoroughly emo. But why? What do we know about Maclaren? Mostly that he is, by his own admission, a playboy astrophysicist who has up to this point not taken life very seriously, and now that he’s in a life-or-death situation he’s not taking shit very well. We know very little about Maclaren’s personal relationships, or his philosophy on life, but we do see how his ego crumbles at the prospect of dying next to a black star and lightyears from home.

If you’re into hard SF then you’ve probably been here before, and you’re also very much into this sort of thing. The ’50s was arguably the first big decade for hard SF, with Anderson as one of its biggest practicioners, but since this is a facts-and-figures kind of story and since it’s from that period, there are a couple things to consider: the first is that there is ONE female character worth anything, and we’ll get to her in a minute. Another thing is that I have to be honest here and admit that after reading the whole serial, I did read the synopsis on Wikipedia to make sure I got the details sort out, because there’s stuff that I just did not understand on an initial read. It probably doesn’t help also that the science is dated, though it’s not that obvious. Apparently Anderson went back and revised the text slightly for later book versions since the serial and the initial book publication came out prior to the “discovery” of tachyon particles, which given the nature of mattercasting is definitely something you’d be justified in including.

What I’m saying is that I may be too stupid to get everything that Anderson is talking about here, although something that did not escape my notice is the social and political aspects of the story, which surprisingly are very much there, despite the fight for suvival at the core of it. While Anderson was almost certainly turning conservative at this point in his career, he does some things with We Have Fed Our Sea that have aged better than one would expect, and he also gives us an ending that, while it does threaten to venture beyond the realm of plausibility, I think is thematically appropriate and even a little unexpected in a good way.

There Be Spoilers Here

After Sverdlov’s death we suddenly jump to a very different scene. Remember that David Ryerson was recently married? His wife Tamara is stuck with Magnus, David’s old man, now her father-in-law, with Magnus being convinced that David is dead (it’s been months at this point since anyone has heard from the crew) while Tamara is still hoping. Oh, and she’s pregnant with David’s kid, naturally. Normally I don’t like it when anything, let alone hard SF, veers toward melodrama, but I actually think this novel could’ve used some flesh-and-blood conflict even if it was somewhat cliched and overwrought. Anyway, Tamara is the only female character here who matters at all, and while she is a satellite character (she does not exist outside of her relationships with the men in her life), she’s at least given more attitude than the average Anderson woman.

It’s also during this scene that I realized Anderson’s playing with race was very much intentional. Three of the four crewmen are at least implied to be POC, and even David, the resident white boy, is part of an interracial marriage. Tamara is said to be Malay, and apparently learning English is akin to learning Latin, or some other language that would now only be used in rituals. Magnus is a proud white man, maybe not a racist but certainly a bit of a jingoist—one who, perhaps unsurprisingly, is into Rudyard Kipling. The novel’s magazine title is taken from a Kipling poem titled “The Song of the Dead” (not the last time Anderson gets on his Kipling shit), and not only does it sound better than the book title (even if The Enemy Stars is more direct), but it feeds more into the conflict between the unstoppable force of humanity and the immovable object that is space. Magnus even quotes part of the poem at the end of the novel, which I’ll also quote here:

“We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there’s never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed’s unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ paid it in full!—”

Magnus is shown to be stuck in his ways, but at least he has the decency to like Kipling, and at least it’s implied he will treat Tamara better after the story’s end.

And indeed death becomes a bigger element as the novel reaches its climax. Nakamura, who in Part 1 was my favorite character, gets killed midway through Part 2 in trying to land the Southern Cross on the planet where the survivors can get their germanium; it was almost more of a crash than a real landing. Nakamura’s death is perhaps the most tragic of the bunch, but I have a mild qualm with how it’s written—specifically that it’s not told from Nakamura’s perspective in his final moments, but Maclaren recounting what happened after the fact. Nakamura’s sado-masochistic obsession with space reaches its conclusion here, and it’s a shame we don’t get a line to his thoughts about it in his final moments. Maclaren speculates that Nakamura had intentionally sacrificed himself since rations were running low and, hell, the Southern Cross no longer needed to be airborne, since there was no way to return it to civilization. “Or perhaps, simply, he found his dark bride.” We never find out, but that doesn’t matter anymore; the only goal now is stay alive long enough to fix the mattercaster.

At this point I’m not sure what I ought to say about the final twist—not Ryerson and Maclaren repairing the mattercaster, that’s not a twist. No, I’m talking about what happens when they find a resonance (i.e., somewhere they can teleport to) and they have no clue where it is or what could be on the other side. I’ve read a couple reviews of this novel and nobody that I’ve read has brought up the final twist, even when discussing spoilers, which is a little… conspicuous. Because the twist is really something, for better or worse; I’m not totally sure if it’s plausible, but it does reinforce the notion that space is fucking massive, and that we have not touched even 99.5% of it. I’ll also say that it’s not a deus ex machina—at least not entirely. You’ll have to read and form your own take on it, because I guess I’ll just continue the pseudo-tradition and refrain from talking about the final twist specifically.

A Step Farther Out

We Have Fed Our Sea is a bit unusual among the Anderson works I’ve read, in how simultaneously claustrophobic and epic it is; the epicness is rather characteristic of Anderson—the claustrophobia is not. Instead of exploring an alien culture, or in the case of his fantasy stories returning to Nordic mythology, we have a character-focused drama which especially leans into the “drama” part in its latter half. Not that the characters are the most nuanced ever, but they do play their roles well, and ultimately they feed into a much larger drama about the human race and its place among the stars. It’s not as romantic about space travel as what you’d see with a lot of hard SF—hell, it’s not as romantic as some of Anderson’s own later takes on the subject. Yet it’s a cautiously optimistic story, and while there were some parts that confused me (due to technobabble and not any “literary” difficulty), I feel like this is just the kind of novel to grow fonder in my memory. As of right now I’d say it’s B-tier Anderson: not his best but it’s pretty far from his worst.

I’m not totally sure what keeps bringing me back to Anderson. Rarely do I love his work, but I often find him compulsively readable. Hell, I had just finished rereading Brain Wave a couple weeks ago, right before starting We Have Fed Our Sea, and normally I don’t read two novels by the same author in such quick succession. Maybe it’s because at his best Anderson excels at certain things other SF authors don’t, namely his talent for world-building (both literally and in terms of writing lore), and also, like Kipling, he’s a conservative writer whose faults and virtues, the very things that make him tick, make him a chronicler of empire—only with Anderson it’s the American empire. And of course, I have to admit, Anderson can write a pretty entertaining yarn when he chooses.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin

November 24th, 2022

(Cover by Fred Gambino. Asimov’s, August 1996.)

Who Goes There?

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most lauded SFF writers of the 20th century, by far; it’s not even close. She made her genre debut in 1962, already in her thirties, and while she was a bit slow to start she managed to kick off both of her most famous series by the end of that decade: Earthsea and the Hainish cycle. (I remember some people in middle school reading A Wizard of Earthsea, but I didn’t read it myself until years later.) From the ’60s until her death in 2018, Le Guin was not only crowned as one of the field’s great storytellers but as one of its very few sagely figures; there’s a Twitter bot that posts nuggets of Le Guin’s wisdom daily. Of course, it can be a bit stifling to have to contend with someone who apparently never said or did anything wrong—who is treated by many as a saint. The result is someone who is most fascinating (in my opinion) when she is dealing with human faults and the inherent conflict of sentient existence; she is not, as it were, something to packed inside a fortune cookie or an automated Twitter account.

What’s really impressive about Le Guin is her versatility. Aside from being equally comfortable with SF and fantasy writing, there are also few authors (anywhere, not just in the field) who wear as many hats as Le Guin does. There’s Le Guin the sociologist, Le Guin the feminist, Le Guin the Taoist, Le Guin the anarchist, Le Guin the pacifist, Le Guin the teller of tall tales, and often these hats are not mutually exclusive. Much as I love guys like Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein, they very much have formulas (or in Heinlein’s case fetishes), whereas Le Guin is harder to pin down, and even when she was in the fourth decade of her career she was still, as Joseph Conrad would put it, “striking out for a new destiny.” Today’s short story, “Mountain Ways,” is part of the Hainish cycle, a grand continuity Le Guin had abandoned midway into the ’70s but then returned to in the ’90s. It’s late Le Guin, but that’s not a mark against it!

Now, a brief rant…

“Mountain Ways” won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, which is now called the Otherwise Award. The James Tiptree, Jr. Award is bestowed upon SFF which explores gender; it’s a reference to the fact that Tiptree was a pseudonym for a woman, Alice Sheldon, but it also makes sense since much of “Tiptree’s” writing is concerned with gender relations and women’s precarious status in a world where men almost without exception hold the most power. Recently the award’s name was changed, on account of the contentious circumstances surrounding Sheldon’s death. This was really fucking stupid. This is not the same as, say, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer being renamed the Astounding Award; I don’t entirely agree with the rationale behind that award being renamed, but I can at least sympathize with the people calling for that change. The story behind Tiptree is too complicated for me to recount here (I’ll cover her more in-depth later, don’t worry), but I just think that, regardless of how well-intentioned the change was, erasing Tiptree’s achievements like this was monstrously stupid, even in bad taste. It should be corrected as soon as possible.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1996 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. If that’s not good enough then just know it was reprinted online FOR FREE in the March 2014 issue of Clarkesworld, so you have no excuse! We have a few book reprints of interest, including the Le Guin collection The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, along with the Library of America box set containing the entire Hainish cycle. Le Guin is one of the few SFF authors to get LOA editions, although weirdly they have not collected the Earthsea series. There’s also the anthology The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, which might still be in print? I’m not sure. With this story the reprints are a matter of quality over quantity; it’s hard to go wrong with the options.

Enhancing Image

We get an author’s note from Le Guin at the very beginning, detailing the most unusual aspect of human culture on the planet O: its version of polygamy. I say “version of” because while polygamy is the norm on O, its setup is both convoluted and conservative. You have four people, two mena dn two women, who each come from different clans; you have a Morning man and a Morning woman, as well as an Evening man and an Evening woman. The Morning man is allowed, within the marriage, to have sex with the Evening man and the Evening woman (homosexuality is not taboo here, but as we’ll see there are other problems), BUT he is prohibited from having sex with the Morning woman. While it does involve four people, the plural marriage typical of O is effectively four pairings mingled together with certain arbitrary restrictions.

The main characters of “Mountain Ways” are a Morning woman and an Evening woman, named Shahes and Akal respectively. Shahes is the daughter of a marriage that sadly is now half-empty, since the Evening partners died in an accident, leaving the Morning partners “widowed” despite the fact that they still have each other. The setting, in broad strokes, will strike some readers as familiar, since it is mountainous farmland, not unlike rural Switzerland or the landscape of Alberta, Canada. Also not unlike the rural Swiss, the people of these mountains are a conservative lot, with their strict adherence to their version of polygamy being a fine example of Le Guin subverting our expectations at the outset. In the real world, the traditionalists are always the ones crying for strict monogamy, with even groups with histories of polygamy like the Mormons now being staunch monogamists (just reminding myself to chew out Orson Scott Card when I inevitably review something of his), but here it’s quite the opposite.

The people up there in the mountains are civilized but not very civilized. Like most ki’O they pride themselves on doing things the way they’ve always been done, but in fact they are a willful, stubborn lot who change the rules to suit themselves and then say the people “down there” don’t know the rules, don’t honor the old ways, the true ki’O ways, the mountain ways.

Akal, who goes at first by the religous name of Enno, comes to Shahes’s place as a farm hand, and a pretty able one; she’s taller than the average woman, and while her occupation has been as a religious scholar, she has not exactly lived a pampered life. It takes all of about five minutes for Shahes and Akal to fall in love—and by that I mean they start fucking at the first opportunity. Their love affair is a fast and furious one, and it doesn’t take long for them to pledge their whole selves to each other and all that, except there’s one problem that faces them: they can’t get married. Sure, as Morning and Evening women they could love each other to their hearts’ content within a group marriage, but that would require two extra people. In the area there is one viable (by that we mean desirable) Morning man, named Otorra, but even if he were to say yes that still left the problem of an Evening man.

Unless…?

Shahes suggests that Akal go away for some months and returns disguised as an Evening man; she thinks it’s positive because Akal, who already has a masculine physique, could pass off as a man, and also because people in the area know Akal by her religious name, not her true name. What would happen then if that Shahes would ask Temly, a woman she likes enough and with whom she’s had intimate relations before, to become the Evening woman in the marriage while Akal becomes the Evening “man.”

Akal stared through the dark at Shahes, speechless. Finally she said, “What you’re proposing is that I go away now and come back after half a year dressed as a man. And marry you and Temly and a man I never met. And live here the rest of my life pretending to be a man. And nobody is going to guess who I am or see through it or object to it. Least of all my husband.”

“He doesn’t matter.”

“Yes he does,” said Akal. “It’s wicked and unfair. It would desecrate the marriage sacrament. And anyway it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t fool everybody! Certainly not for the rest of my life!”

“What other way have we to marry?”

“Find an Evening husband—somewhere—”

“But I want you! I want you for my husband and my wife. I don’t want any man, ever. I want you, only you till the end of life, and nobody between us, and nobody to part us. Akal, think, think about it, maybe it’s against religion, but who does it hurt? Why is it unfair? Temly likes men, and she’ll have Otorra. He’ll have her, and Danro. And Danro will have their children. And I will have you, I’ll have you forever and ever, my soul, my life and soul.”

Aside from the fact that there’s no fucking way this plan would work, it’s still an effective subversion of the typical “marriage plot” narriage; you have two people who basically want to be monogamous with each other but can’t due to the staunch polygamy of their culture. Rather than a couple of cheaters plotting to cut out a third wheel so they can be together, Shahes and Akal plot to recruit a couple people. But like I said, this plot is doomed to fail. For one thing (and mind you, Akal is aware of this), you would not be able to fool somebody like this for decades on end; you probably couldn’t even away with it for a month. We’re also not given much detail as to how Akal intends to pass as a man, but if dressing up different really is all she does, then the whole thing is doomed, no question.

There is one thing that popped into my head, and I’m not sure if this was by design or if it was simply an oversight on Le Guin’s part: What if Akal was transgender? Or rather, what if Akal passed as a trans man? How does this culture deal with genderqueer people? It’d be safe to bet that given their conservatism they’d want nothing to do with genderqueer people, but also remember that homosexuality is a non-issue for the people of O. My assumption is that Le Guin didn’t consider this, not that it’s her fault really, but still the conflict would remain if Akal were to fake her gender in this way; if anything it’d be more plausible if she said she was a trans man and fooled Otorra and Temly, but still faced internal conflict because she felt guilty over not being true to herself. The biggest argument against such an alteration to the narrative is that it could possibly come off as transphobic (you know, person lies about their gender to fool others), but you could already make that argument with the story as is.

The words “straight,” “gay,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual” never get used in “Mountain Ways,” which I actually like since jargon changes over time and refraining from using such terminology helps the story feel a bit more timeless. On O, biseuxality is presumed to be the norm, but part of the conflict comes from the fact that Shahes is strongly drawn to Akal (to the point of irresponsibility) and Akal is all but said to be a lesbian, although her terrible experience with a former male partner is implied to factor into that. This is by means the first time Le Guin has played with gender (see perhaps her most famous novel, The Left Hand of Darkness), but she’s clearly still playing with tools she had not touched before, combining the conundrum of gender with rigid societal norms. O is not a dystopia, but its culture is shown here to not be very inclusive.

Of course it’s not just a conservative culture that fans the plot: things probably wouldn’t be too bad if Shahes and Akal kept their libidos in their pants long enough to agree that maybe it’d be better if they kept their relationship on the down-low. It wouldn’t be ideal, but it’d be a lot better than to trick a couple people into a joining a marriage, and Akal knows this, being a scholar and considerably more morally upright than Shahes. Like I said, the central internal conflict is Akal feeling bad that she has to lie to herself and other people like this, and correctly she thinks it would be wrong to their other partners to treat them this way. Not immediately apparent, but Shahes is at best a decent person who lets her passion compel her to do some shitty things, and more likely is a manipulative person who all but coerces Akal into going along with what she sees as the only “correct” option. Shahes is not evil (rarely does Le Guin write “evil” characters), but her insistence on doing wrong in the name of true love naturally leads to tragedy.

There Be Spoilers Here

The biggest problem with the scheme is that since Akal is now the Evening “man” and Otorra is the Morning man, they’re expected to have sexual relations, which means Akal will be outed. Conveniently, it turns out that Otorra is straight! Like Akal he also had a bad experience with a male partner in the past, although it’s not clear if he had already thought of himself as straight or if the bad experience put him off of same-sex relations. It’s also not clear if the scene where Otorra confesses his orientation is also the point where he gathers that Akal is actually a woman, but a later conversation implies this is the case. Both Otorra and Temly, at different points, figure out Akal’s true nature, although curiously they don’t make a scene about it and they don’t tell Shahes anything. Indeed Shahes is the last person to be informed that the scheme had failed, which leads to the climax and the story’s most dramatic scene—and also its weakest.

If I had one major qualm with “Mountain Ways” it would be the ending, or rather the fact that there isn’t one. There just isn’t an ending. Like yeah it technically exists, the story does come to a close, but it’s so abrupt and inconclusive that I actually thought there had been a misprint and the story was cut off prematurely. Unfortunately no. The implication I think we’re supposed to get is that Shahes plots to kill… Otorra? Temly? Akal? All of them somehow? But literally nothing comes of it; the story ends without resolution. It’s also weird because up to this point the narration has been third-person, yes, but it’s also been more or less anchored in Akal’s perspective. Suddenly the perspective changes to Shahes’s in the very last page and her growing jealousy and insecurity have apparently reached a boiling point, overhearing the others laughing at Akal being found out.

I can’t believe the plan that was obviously never going to work unraveled in a matter of weeks. I’m not even sure how Otorra and Temly feel about Akal being a woman; they say they had figured out what she was, but we get nothing as to what they intend to do about the fact that the Evening man is an Evening woman. Partly this has to do with Otorra and Temply (especially Temly, she gets next to nothing to do here) being underdeveloped, but I also see this as a case where ambiguity doesn’t actually add anything.

You could probably come up with a defense for the ending, but I have to admit I can’t add it up on either an emotional or intellectual level. It’s unsatisfying on a gut level but it also feels like Le Guin legitimately couldn’t come up with a reaction worth anything for when Akal is inevitably found out. Not that I want to see Shahes stick a knife in one of her partners; quite the contrary, I was hoping Le Guin would refrain from such a option altogether. It’s just so cliched for a love triangle (or in this case a love square) to end in violence, and it’s especially beneath “Mountain Ways” since so much thought was put into O’s customs and norms.

I guess it’s also frustrating that this all wasn’t told from Shahes’s perspective, since her journey from heroine to anti-heroine to villainess (it’s very hard to sympathize with her by the end) feels choppy and somewhat implausible as is. This perspective issue, combined with the lack of a real ending, leads me to think “Mountain Ways” could’ve used one more rewrite, so that maybe it could be ranked among the best of Le Guin’s short fiction.

A Step Farther Out

“Mountain Ways” sees Le Guin in full-on sociologist mode, but it’s also justified in its Tiptree Award win as an examination of gender in the midst of a culture that’s too stuck in its ways to handle such a topic properly. The people of O are strict polygamists, and their adherence to plural marriage is clearly meant to parallel real-life heteronormative crusaders who die on the hill of “traditional marriage.” It’s not perfect. It could’ve been longer, not only to give us a proper conclusion but also to flesh out the charactrs, half of whom existence as little more than plot devices. Is it anti-polygamy? Of course not, and it’s not transphobic either. Le Guin, as she often does, argues that tradition for its own sake is a bad thing, and that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all relationship model. Shahes and Akal would be happy together if they were allowed to just marry each other, but they weren’t and the outcome was a tragic one. How tragic, and in what way exactly? You’ll just have to read it for yourself.

See you next time.
Serial Review: We Have Fed Our Sea by Poul Anderson (Part 1/2)

November 20th, 2022

(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Astounding, August 1958.)

Who Goes There?

A big deal within the field from the ’50s until his death in 2001, Poul Anderson was a giant whose star power has lessened somewhat in recent years. You can easily find Anderson books (a seemingly endless supply of them) in used bookstores, but much of his work is currently out of print. This is all a little mystifying. Anderson has his quirks, but his range and productivity are impeccable, being one of those authors who, while he did write a lot more science fiction than fantasy, was comfortable with both. There is an Anderson book or series for every season; if you don’t like, say, the Nicholas van Rijin stories, then you might like the Time Patrol series. If you told me that Brain Wave and The Broken Sword, novels which came out the same year, were written by THE SAME GUY, I would shit myself. Curiosly, while he wrote many novels, many of which are acclaimed (I really like The High Crusade and Tau Zero myself), all of Anderson’s seven Hugos and three Nebulas belong to his short fiction.

We Have Fed Our Sea will strike a few people as familiar under its book title, The Enemy Stars. I picked this up for review because a) I’d been meaning to read it, and b) from what I could tell it sounded like a fitting counterpart to our previous serial, Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To…, both literarily and philosophically. Not only is Anderson a generation older than Russ, but he’s also… well, a lot more conservative. Whereas Russ’s novel has an implicit but persistent layer of feminism in its thematic makeup, Anderson’s novel is much more typical of the hard-headed facts-and-figures SF that would’ve made the rounds in Astounding and later Analog.

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 was published in the August 1958 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Anderson’s estate has been stingy about looking the other way for online reprints, so when seeing if an Anderson story has been archived it’s a real flip of the coin. I have to assume that something nefarious is going on since Anderson wrote a lot and a lot of it is out of print, and his estate isn’t keen on letting people actually discover his work without bending over backwards. Anyway, it looks like The Enemy Stars has not been in paperback since the ’80s; it has an ebook edition from Open Road Media, but Open Road Media is dogshit and I wouldn’t recommend giving them money unless you really have to. A reprint of particular interest would have to be The Best of Astounding: Classic Short Novels from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, edited by James E. Gunn (not to be confused with the other James Gunn), which collects The Enemy Stars along with a few other novels and novellas.

Enhancing Image

The opening passage of We Have Fed Our Sea is also perhaps the most memorable in Part 1, which is really unfair, because Anderson sets a standard for himself that he proceeds to not meet again; to be fair to him, that standard is pretty high. The launching and flight of the Southern Cross, the farthest traveling spaceship in human history, is described in almost Biblical terms, and Anderson wants us to know two things right away: that the universe is unfathonably big, and that the Southern Cross is nothing short of ancient. With this ship we’re not talking years but centuries, and while my gut reaction is to think that a spaceship would become outdated long before then, rendering the Southern Cross a metal coffin, this is a ship that seems specifically designed to be able to go the distance. Even so, its placement as a sort of generation ship where many people have died and even been killed gives the Southern Cross a slight haunted house vibe.

The effect is grand, yet ominous. Or maybe the other way around.

Get this:

After ten generations, the Southern Cross was not quite halfway to her own goal, though she was the farthest from Earth of any human work. She was showing a little wear, here a scratch, there a patch, and not all the graffiti of bored and lonely men rubbed out by their successors. But those fields and particles which served her for eye, brain, nerve still swept heaven; each man at the end of his watch took a box of microplates with him as he made the hundred light-year stride to Earth’s Moon. Much of this was lost, or gathered dust, in the century when Earthmen were busy surviving. But there came a time when a patient electrically seeing machine ran through many such plates from many ships. And so it condemned certain people to death.

The Southern Cross is on a voyage to rendezvous with a black star, what Part 1’s blurb calls a “burned-out supernova,” a thing blacker than space itself and which is possibly as old as the universe. The black star is the novel’s Big Dumb Object, although unlike most Big Dumb Objects it’s not an alien construction (as far as we know) but something completely natural. It’s just that the black hole is massive and, like the ship studying it, so old as to be practically ageless. Anderson is hunting big game with regards to visuals and a sense of wonder with this one, and he puts his best foot forward here. If the spectacle is spoiled by anything it’s the inevitability of human characters.

Speaking of which…

Before I started reading We Have Fed Our Sea I suspected that we would basically start on the ship with our principal characters already gathered together, and if not then there would be minimum setup. To my surprise, though, a good chunk of Part 1 is dedicated to seeing our main characters in their natural habitat before they get teleported aboard the ghost ship. I say “teleport” because teleporting is a central factor in the novel’s world; it’s called mattercasting, and it very well anticipates beaming individuals as seen in Star Trek. With modern technology teleporting Our Heroes™ onto the Southern Cross, despite it being light-years away from the closest human colony, is not a big deal, but teleporting off the ship may prove a problem.

Now for the players: We have Terangi Maclaren, a brilliant but lazy playboy scientist who signs up for the expedition as a way to prove his continuing worth in his field; David Ryerson, a dilligent and recently married young man who joins to appease his Christmongering father who happens to hold a death grip on his allowance; Seiichi Nakamura, a melancholy martial artist and devout Buddhist who joins because he wants to get away from the suffocating colony planet where he lives; and Chang Sverdlov, a would-be revolutionary who’s not very good at hiding the fact that he hates Earthlings and wants colonial independence.

Be aware that while Anderson’s novel is big on wonder, it’s not so big on women. There are two women in Part 1, one of whom I don’t even think is named, with both being satellites to two of our main characters. Ryerson’s wife exists to see him off and hope he comes back in one piece. At least the women are simply guided offstage quietly and aren’t stuffed in a fridge. Sexism is a bit of a problem with Anderson; he fairs a good deal better with regards to race. Unless I’m mistaken, Ryerson is the only white man in the crew, with the others being at least implied to be POC. There is a bit of a caviat with Nakamura, since he is, let’s face it, somewhat stereotyped: as said before, he’s into martial arts, he’s fixated on honorable behavior, and he’s the most timid of the crewmen. Yet Nakamura’s speech is not caricatured, he’s allowed to talk and act like a normal person, and as I’ll explain in the spoilers section, he’s arguably the most human of the bunch.

This is not to say that these introductory scenes with each of the characters gives us Henry James levels of psychological depth; the men are meant to fill roles, rather than act as individuals with inner lives. With maybe an exception or two every inner monologue anyone has has to do with either the plot or the worldbuilding, which is not necessarily a bad thing since worldbuilding is where We Have Fed Our Sea excels the most—not just the literal worldbuilding of the black star but a galaxy-spanning mankind. Since the days when Southern Cross flew into the depths of space, mankind has conquered quite a few colony worlds, united under the Protectorate (totally not the Federation from Star Trek), with Earth at the center. At it turns out, though, not everyone is happy to be living in a hostile environment, all while being farmed for resources by the heart of the Protectorate, hence the existence of rebels like Sverdlov.

Just going off of what has happened in the novel, I’m not sure where Anderson stands on the relationship Earth has with the colonies, which he depicts as being at least somewhat parasitic, while at the same time painting people like Sverdlov in a villainous light—not that this novel has (at least so far) an outright human villain. Anderson’s worldview changed considerably during the ’50s; he went from being a liberal who staunchly supported the UN to a hawkish Goldwater-era libertarian type. Actually, if anything, the reference to Rudyard Kipling with its magazine title (which, in my opinion, is easily superior to the oddly pulpier book title) suggests that by this point Anderson had become a Kiplingesque conservative. I wouldn’t be surprised, then, if he turns out to sympathize with the colonists while also thinking the Protectorate to be a necessary evil, if not benign.

There are a few questions Anderson doesn’t answer, such as: Where are all the robots? What about androids? If you have teleportation then surely you would have androids equal to if not better than humans. Why send such a small crew to the Southern Cross? What about backup? I suspect, however, that the government would see it as more costly to risk sending highly advanced robots on what almost amounts to a suicide mission than a bunch of ultimately expendable meat sacks. This is also very much an old-fashioned space adventure in the sense that there’s a surprising lack of computer technology onboard, what with stuff like the microchip not having been invented in the real world yet; but then this is also justifable given how fucking old the ship is. A few scratches and patches will prove to be the least of the crew’s problems.

There Be Spoilers Here

Like I said, Nakamura strikes me as the most human of the crew, which does lead to me feeling conflicted about him. On the one hand, making Nakamura Japanese was very much deliberate; it’s not like Anderson picked his race out of a hat. Nakamura’s backstory is a pretty tragic one: his family was killed in a natural dissaster, and this was after he had already been transplanted as a child, having moved from Japan to a colony world. Undoubtedly there’s meant to be an evocation of Japanese wartime trauma, reminding me specifically of the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, though Anderson was probably thinking of Hiroshima. Of the four cremen, Nakamura’s backstory is easily the most death-haunted, and his fascination with space is made more peculiar by his fear of it.

I have to admit that Anderson’s novel subverted a few of my exepectations. Aside from the racially diverse cast I was surprised by the stance it took on space exploration, which is nowhere near as blindingly optimistic as I had assumed, especially given other Anderson works I’ve read. Joanna Russ’s novel We Who Are About To… is obviously a deconstruction of narratives in which mankind should and does seek out the corners of space, overcoming every obstacle, but Anderson’s novel is actually not too far removed from that viewpoint. While not as pessimistic as Russ’s novel, We Have Fed Our Sea, regardless of its title, alludes to the vastness and grand indifference of space which in practice comes off as malevolence; these are not the friendly stars, or the neutral stars, but the enemy stars. The cold dead star around which the Southern Cross orbits is an almost Lovecraftian presence, like Moby Dick, a great titan of nature which rejects human understanding. Yet like Moby Dick, there is a godlike magnetism with the dark star, and the same thing applies to space itself. In Moby Dick, Ishmael tells us he joins a ship and heads out to sea whenever a particular terrible bout of melancholy hits him, and Nakamura’s situation is not so different.

Metaphysical elements are not unknown to Anderson; he strikes me as a Christian, albeit a highly pragnatic one. Indeed the religiosity of his fantasy novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, which is topped with the protagonist even converting to Catholicism at the end (it’s not as preachy as it sounds), suggests a recurring conflict for any great religious writer: the conflict between science and God. Not science and organized religion, mind you, but science and the idea of a grand designer—an otherworldly force whose intentions are mysterious. As the crewmen find themselves in a precarious position at the end of Part 1, between technical issues and wanting to tear each other to pieces despite needing each other, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say their conflict is both physical and metaphysical.

A Step Farther Out

I suppose I was expecting a metaphysical angle, but I was not also expecting the political angle. It’s hard to tell with Anderson because depending on when a given story was written he can be pretty subtle or pretty cane-waving about it. The Protectorate and the colonies are not on the best of terms, and I’m not sure which side Anderson sympathizes with more, though I can chock that up to the characters all being sympathetic enough, or rather none of them is totally evil. Maclaren is a bit of an asshole, and Sverdlov is treacherous, but their viewpoints are not inexplicable; from the colonists’ view the “Earthlings” are callous and exploitative, while from the Earthlings’ view the colonists are ungrateful and reckless when it comes to the sheer vastness of the universe. Even with ‘casting, the universe is unfathomably huge, and my mind keeps going back to that introductory section with the Southern Cross and how it instantly conveys a foreboding sense of scale. The technobabble can be a bit much (I don’t understand half of it, and I suspect Anderson does it partly to distract less discerning readers), but this is looking to be enjoyable hard SF yarn.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “The Kragen” by Jack Vance

November 17th, 2022

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Fantastic, July 1964.)

Who Goes There?

Jack Vance is a contender for the most influential mid-20th century SFF writer that relatively few people have read. He debuted in 1945, and unusually for a writer of that period his science fiction tended to read like fantasy—his fantasy, because nobody at that point wrote fantasy quite like Vance did. His 1950 collection (it’s a collection, I don’t CARE if some people call it a novel) The Dying Earth presents an Earth so far in the future that magic has not only emerged but overtaken technology; it influenced, among other things, Dungeons & Dragons. He would win two Hugos and a Nebula for the novellas “The Dragon Masters” and “The Last Castle,” which, despite sounding like they’d be fantasy, are in fact science fiction. He won a third Hugo in 2010 (this man lived a long time), this time for Best Related Work, with his autobiography This Is Me, Jack Vance! Even in his works that are not fantasy at all, there always seems to be a sense of magic with Vance.

Something to keep in mind is that Vance wrote a lot over a long span of time, and he has quirks that people will either accept or reject. If you really need your SFF to be colloquial or down to earth then you will probably not like Vance; his penchant for the flamboyant and the baroque has blocked off many would-be Vance fans. I have to admit that I wasn’t into Vance for a while, and even not I can’t say I love his work, but I do respect it and often enjoy it. Surely there’s something to like about a guy who will write a short story, set it on a planet that he’ll never write about again, and not only grant that setting a novel’s worth of detail, but even include footnotes. Vance is clearly a fan of planet-building, and it’s a niche talent he’s quite adept at, as we’ll see with today’s novella.

Placing Coordinates

“The Kragen” was first published in the July 1964 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. A bit of a long story with this one. It’s not unusual for novellas to be expanded into novels, or to be made into sections of novels like they’re pieces in a jigsaw puzzle; in my experience the novella usually doesn’t benefit by being inflated to novel-length. “The Kragen” was expanded into the novel The Blue World in 1966, with the novel version getting nominated for a Nebula and being up for the Prometheus Hall of Fame a few times (makes sense). I just assumed that since the novel version is more well-known that “The Kragen” would be one of those novellas to get reprinted maybe once. Not quite! It was reprinted in Robert Silverberg Presents the Great SF Stories: 1964, edited by… you guessed it, Robert Silverberg (and also Martin H. Greenberg). It got a chapbook release from Subterranean Press, which is weird, like who asked for this? We have at least one in-print edition with the Vance collection Wild Thyme and Violets and Other Unpublished Works, in both paperback and as an ebook.

Enhancing Image

Much of this review will be spent on the world-building of “The Kragen,” rather than the plot, since the actual plot is pretty simple when viewed with a wide lens; I suppose it has to be. Vance has about sixty pages to not only introduce a whole world to us but to make it comprehensible, so while there are a few twists and turns, this is not one of his more complex narratives. Take it as an adventure story that theoretically could be just as easily fantasy as SF, if not for background details.

The unnamed world of the novella is entirely covered with water, which when you think about it is not so different from our world, which is only mostly water. Several generations ago (the dates aren’t clear) a ship crash-landed on the planet—apparently a ship full of criminals (though given their ability to procreate it must’ve been co-ed), and surprisingly the survivors did not all kill each other within a month; instead they found ways to survive and even prosper on the blue planet. This is impressive, not only because civilization managed to rebuild itself out of a bunch of scraps, but because it did so with some things that we take fore granted, such as electricity and even metal. There is a bit of metal that lies in some people’s possession, but it’s not enough to be used for much of anything, and anyway, nobody knows what to do with it.

Not the first or last time Vance did a lost colony narrative; he arguably did it better in his 1958 novella “The Miracle Workers,” in which survivors of a crashed ship eventually devolve into warring pseudo-medieval factions. In both stories the content could be construed as fantasy while the reasoning behind that content is undeniably science-fictional.

Society works on a caste system, although even at the beginning of the story the system is loosening up, with inter-caste marriage and what have you. In a bit of humor from Vance the castes are named after species of criminal, so you have the Incendiaries, the Swindlers, the Hoodwinks, and so on, with Advertisermen at the bottom. I know, very funny. Hoodwinks actually don’t do what you would expect, as their job is basically to act as signal-men, communicating with people on other floats in a sort of morse code, quite literally winking hoods at the tops of towers. I’m not sure what Swindlers do here, since their occupation probably wouldn’t align with what their name implies. Anyway, the protagonist, Sklar Hast, is one such signal-man, although he spends much more time in-story being a thorn in some authorities’ sides than doing his job.

About those “floats.” Without metal, without even glass, society has to rely on other resources, and in this case they were very lucky, because while the ocean does indeed stretch from pole to pole, there are these vast swaths of sea-plant that are big enough to not only serve as pseudo-land but to be handy for lots of other purposes too. Whatever the plants don’t cover, human bones will sometimes do the trick; apparently the people of this seafaring society are not one to waste the bodies of their dead, though from what I can tell they don’t indulge in cannibalism. I wonder Donald Kingsbury read this (or more likely The Blue World), got to the part where a human rib is used as a hook, and thought, “Hmm, I could write a novel like this.”

Despite the lack of resources, life has been mostly good for Sklar Hast and his people. “On this water-world, which had no name, there were no seasons, no tides, no storms, no change, very little anxiety regarding time.” It’s one thing to have a single-biome planet, but it’s an extra strain on one’s suspension of disbelief that there be practically no harsh weather. Of course, had there been gales and hurricanes then the crash survivors surely would’ve died off, and thus we wouldn’t have a story. You gotta do what you gotta do. There are a few other things, which I’ll get to in the spoilers section, that don’t strike me as the most credible, but Vance (as usual) goes the distance with the mechanics of his newfangled world. A lot of time is spent on what the people of the floats eat and how they eat it, and stuff like that, and much of it is at least intriguing.

But wait, there’s trouble in paradise! The people do have one natural threat to their way of life: the kragen (plural), a race of sea monsters that act more as really large pests than as direct threats to human life. Still, an angry kragen has the bulk and weaponry (tentacles and mandibles) to fuck up a person, and unfortunately the people don’t have weaponry good enough to take on the kragen; instead they have to rely on the supposed goodwill of the largest kragen of them all, King Kragen, which the elders “””allegedly””” are able to communicate with. If King Kragen is appeased with gifts (i.e., food) then he’ll kill or drive off smaller kragen. This feels like solving a big problem with an even bigger problem, but who am I to judge.

A little aside…

We get illustrations of the kragen on both the issue’s cover and with the opening interior illustrations, both done by Ed Emshwiller. Now, Emshwiller is a legend, and I respect him, but while I would say his depictions of the kragen are accurate enough, they seem a little… goofy.

It’s not his best work is what I’m saying.

One day a kragen fucks up Sklar Hast’s abode and instead of waiting on King Kragen to maybe show up, Sklar Hast takes matters into his own hands and rounds up some likeminded fellows to kill the kragen themselves, which they actually come close to doing. The fallout is catastrophic, though, resulting in a schism headed by Sklar Hast with a particularly zealous elder named Barquan Blasdel on the other side. The question comes down to this: Do the elders have any control over King Kragen, or are King Kragen’s appearances merely serendipitous, with the monster’s “help” purely fueled by the prospect of food? This is a Jack Vance story so you know damn well it’s closer to the latter, and come to think of it, questioning and overcoming unjust hierarchies is also a Vance staple. Sklar Hast and his people vow to not only head out on their own, detatching their float from the rest of society, but to kill King Kragen, come hell or high water.

Forgive me, I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time trying not to misspell these weird character names. Not really a Vance story if there aren’t weird character names.

Sklar Hast has manpower on his side, but what he doesn’t heave is the weaponry. Not yet. How do you take down a giant sea monster without guns? Crossbows? Even decent harpoons? They have to figure out how to modernize—to rediscover metal on a planet that’s practically devoid of it, and in the process prove to the elders that they no longer need such an arbitrary quasi-religious order of living. From here on the narrative becomes two-pronged, jumping between Sklar Hast and Barquan Blasdel, the new and the old, as they seek to destroy and protect King Kragen respectively.

There Be Spoilers Here

Mostly I wanna talk about how Sklar Hast and company are able to overpower the Kragen, because it’s… complicated. And also maybe a leap in logic. I’m not a scientist, but I’m not sure if blood works this way. The climactic scene of the men from the renegade float, now with crossbows made of metal and powered with electrical tubes, taking down King Kragen almost made me think more about the logistics of getting all that goddamn metal from burned blood (blood being smoldered down to iron, yes really) than the coolness of the action. And the action can be pretty cool when it’s there! So that says something about how much the solution to the lack of metal makes me scratch my head. The ubiquitous nature of the plant life already threatened to make things too convenient, but this is a bit much. That’s about it. That’s all I felt like saying about that.

A Step Farther Out

I have conflicting feelings as to the length of this thing. The plot is simple enough that I don’t think an extra fifty to a hundred pages would benefit it (mind you that The Blue World itself is quite short), but also I can see that extra wordage benefitting depth, especially character depth but also the workings of Vance’s world. Sklar Hast is a bit of a flat character; he wants one thing for most of the story, which is to kill King Kragen, and we can’t say he matures since he’s shown to be right pretty much from the outset and thus he has no lesson to take from all this. I at least appreciate that the elders, while shown generally to be wrong, are pragmatic enough that they’re not cartoonishly evil, with the exception of Barquan Blasdel. Indeed the pragmatism of the elders becomes part of the novella’s sly humor, which is perhaps chuckle-worthy but never laught-out-loud funny. Even so, I do think Vance’s sense of humor is underrated, and his jokes lend flaor to what would risk becoming a droll and humorless adventure.

I wouldn’t consider “The Kragen” to be Vance’s finest hour, if only because I don’t think it reaches the same level of epicness as his best stories of similar length. Consider that “The Miracle Workers” and “The Last Castle” each fit not only a novel’s worth of world-building into sixty pages, but a novel’s sense of grandeur; these are wondrous tales of action that feel like they’re deserving of big-budget Peter Jackson adaptations. Meanwhile “The Kragen” feels weirdly insular, with even the kragen themselves never being fully allowed to act the part of giant movie monsters. Also, I’m not sure where else to say this, so I’ll say it here: Don’t read “The Kragen” (or most Vance, for that matter) if you absolutely must have women in your fiction. In other words, this is not Vance at his worst, but it’s certainly not his best.

See you next time.
The Observatory: Anthology Limited

November 15th, 2022

(Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. First edition cover by George Salter. Published 1946.)

The mission statement of my blog is to explore SFF in the magazines, of which there are many. Ideally original publications, but at some point I’ll cover stories that were first published elsewhere and then reprinted in the magazines. This is not to say I dislike the other major avenue for finding short fiction, the anthology; after all, I would not have discovered so much short fiction in the first place if not for anthologies, and I have to admit I have a lot of those on my shelves. For every unnecessary reprint of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” there are over a dozen short stories and novellas I now love that I probably would not have found otherwise. The thing, though, is that by focusing on magazines I feel I’ve created both a filter and unlocked a door to a unfathomably huge world of mostly uncovered fiction, non-fiction, letter columns…

There’s only so much you can do with anthologies.

Not a criticism of anthology editors! Some of the best editors in the field have mostly or solely devoted their time to book publishing; when the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine was replaced by the Hugo for Best Professional Editor, it was to accommodate what was then an uptick in original anthologies, as well as to credit specific people whose achievements were not restricted to magazines. People like Damon Knight, Judy-Lynn del Rey, and Terry Carr would have been shut out from Hugo recognition with the previous category, but now they had a chance; that it took more than a decade for someone in book publishing to win Best Professional Editor is beside the point. My point is that this is not a problem of talent, but simply of the nature of anthologies, of their physical limitations and especially of the grim realities of the publishing world.

Let’s retrace our steps a bit. What is the purpose of an anthology? Obviously the answer will be different depending on whether it’s a reprint or original anthology, and even reprint anthologies (which are so often grouped together as fodder, unjustifiably) have different goals in mind. A reprint anthology might seek to cover a certain span of time or a certain demographic of authors; there are several reprints dedicated to female SFF authors at this point and we still have much work to do. The problem is that it’s never enough. I read a short story recently, “The Piece Thing” by Carol Emshwiller; it’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a fine read, and it strikes me as being worthy of being reprinted in at least a couple SF-horror anthologies. Not so. Despite being first published in 1956, it has since been anthologized a grand total of once, in Rediscovery 2: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), which came out… this year. How many more are like it?

Editors of reprint anthologies are allowed to be much pickier than magazine editors while also having a bigger pool to work with (keep in mind that magazines have to deal with a lot already), and as such their standards are inherently different. If a story which originally appeared in some obscure magazine in the ’50s was anthologized even once then presumably the editor of said anthology thought it worthy enough to not be stranded in a volume quite literally made of pulp paper which was not built to last and which has been out of circulation for many years. Sure, the issue that “The Piece Thing” first appeared in (the May 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly, for those wondering) can now be read online, but prior to digital archiving there was literally only one way to find this story for decades. Again, how many stories are in this situation? How many “worthy” stories have been trapped in purgatory because anthology editors have overlooked them or simply not been able to know about them in the first place?

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Science Fiction Quarterly, May 1956.)

Again, this is not really the fault of editors. Well, maybe some of it is. There were quite a few female authors active in the ’40s and especially the ’50s, but you wouldn’t know that from contemporary reprint anthologies; even Judith Merril’s annual best-of anthologies tended to only have one or two stories by women per volume. Maybe that’s unfair, though. Maybe it really has to do more with the editor’s tastes than with their prejudices, not that the two don’t overlap at all. You can’t make an editor include a more diverse set of authors, and anyway I don’t think setting quotas is very healthy. Still, it’s telling that there have been several anthologies over the decades which have sought to “rediscover” magazine SFF by women, as if to compensate for the failings of earlier anthologies. It’s as if editors are only human and that they’re liable to overlook fiction which is very much deversing of preservation.

Because that’s what reprints are always ultimately about: preservation. Why anthologize in the first place? Why were fancy hardcover anthologies like Adventures in Time and Space and Groff Conklin’s A Treasury of Science Fiction big deals when they surfaced in the ’40s? Because for basically all of the stories included in those anthologies, it would’ve been the first time they met a reader’s eyes outside of the flimsy and brittle pages of a magazine; with book reprints there was hope that these stories could be discovered by future generations. Consider that Lovecraft’s legacy has been allowed to not only persist but thrive for two reasons: he was a compulsive letter writer who formed connections with a lot of people, a few of whom went on to form publishing houses (namely August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who founded Arhham House), and also because said publishers made his work available in book form.

Lovecraft died poor and in obscurity, but if his work stayed in the magazines like virtually all of it was at the time of his death, he might now be yet another shrouded figure waiting to be rediscovered.

(Beyond the Wall of Sleep, editor uncredited. Cover by Clark Ashton Smith and E. Burt Trimpey. Published 1943.)

Obviously there’s a lot of crap in the magazines that’s not worth actively preserving; Sturgeon’s Law will not be defied. But I feel like even with the good stuff, there’s so much of it that anthologies are simply unable to cover everything. Take one of the greatest SFF anthologies of all time for instance, Adventures in Time and Space: this is a thick fucking book (about a thousand pages), and it has an extra advantage by covering only a relatively narrow range of material, with pieces published between 1932 and 1945. It also does something unusual for a fiction anthology, in that on top of the fiction it also reprints two speculative articles, which other reprint anthologies simply don’t do for some reason. Even with all these parameters, the 33 stories collected only emcompass a tiny fraction of the good stuff from that period, and it doesn’t help that editors Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas give some authors multiple entries, which dilutes the diversity of voices. If you’re looking for a survey of where SFF was at in the ’30s and first half of the ’40s then a volume like Adventures in Time and Space will be a good starting point, but then you must dig deeper after that.

Keep in mind that most anthologies aren’t as long as Adventures in Time and Space; most are half that length, or even shorter. How many times have you started a anthology and the editor’s introduction goes something like this: “If I could edit a hypothetical hyper-dimensional book that never ran of space so that I could fit all the stories I wanted, I would, but unfortunately we don’t live in that reality so I can’t.” The horrors of picking favorites indeed. Imagine being a Gardner Dozois or a Terry Carr where you’re such a voracious reader, and you have hundreds of magazine issues and hundreds upon hundreds (vast oceans!) of stories at your disposal, and you can only pick so many. Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction series was huge, both in its number of installments and the thickness of each book, and yet he still felt it necessary to list stories that he would recommend that unfortunately he could not include properly. These recommendation lists were always quite long, and while these stories weren’t always taken from magazines, that tended to br the case more often than not.

Best-of anthologies try valiantly to sum up “the good stuff” from a given year, and we seem to be living in a golden age of best-of anthologies as we have several of them, all by capable editors. However, even if you were to combine the annual best-ofs by Neil Clarke, Jonathan Strahan, and Rich Horton (we’re looking at a good 1,500 pages or more, by the way) for a given year, you still could not even hope to cover everything. SFF is vast and it’s only gotten vaster as we’ve entered a new golden age for magazine SFF, what with magazines like Lightspeed and Uncanny Magazine voyaging beyond mere page count and entering that fourth dimension: digitalization. I can’t even say for sure how many pages it would take to print all the good SFF in 2022 because most of the magazines currently running publish exclusively online and in ebooks. The sheer amount can drive one mad; it feels like a variation on Borges’s library of Babel.

(The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2020, edited by Rich Horton. Cover by Argus.)

What I’m trying to say is that I find magazines ultimately more liberating. Sure, an issue of a magazine will be smaller and contain fewer stories than the average anthology, but there’s that flavor unique to magazines, and there’s always that feeling of digging for buried treasure. If a story shows up in a reprint anthology then it’s not up to you to rediscover it, as someone already did that job for you. Ah, but if you were to find some obscure story from six decades ago that has maybe been reprinted once in all that time while in the middle of digging through an equally obscure magazine issue, then it really feels like discovery! And the best part is that it doesn’t stop there. You’re not just leafing through an anthology—a selection of stories hand-picked by someone who had narrowed a pile down to what they feel are the best of the best—you’re a voyager, on a five-mission mission to explore strange new worlds. With the magazines you’re bound to hear voices you’ve never heard before and see places you’ve never seen before.

When I started this blog I wasn’t sure if I was ready to plumb the depths of magazine SFF, and ironically, as I’ve since only come to find just how deep those depths are, I’ve only become more excited about reaching for those depths. I turn over a rock and I find gold in the mud. Anthologies are a great supplement to magazines, but they’re not a substitute, for there’s always more to be uncovered, and the magazine, when taken collectively, is named Möbius.
Serial Review: We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ (Part 2/2)

November 13th, 2022

(Cover by Andrew M. Stephenson. Galaxy, February 1976.)

Who Goes There?

Joanna Russ was one of the defining feminist voices in ’60s and ’70s SF, as both a fiction writer and a critic. Her combative nature combined with her keen insight led to her accumulating a fair amount of enemies, but also some surprising allies; James Blish and Jim Baen were apparently defenders of Russ, despite being about as different from her politically as one can imagine. Her 1975 novel The Female Man remains her single most famous work, but she probably resonates with modern readers most strongly with her book-length essay How to Suppress Women’s Writing. In case these title choices don’t make it obvious, Russ is deeply concerned with women’s autonomy as people and as creatives. Lesbianism also figures into Russ’s writing, which is not unusual for second-wave feminism, though you’d be surprised how much it doesn’t show up (at least explicitly), including in today’s serial.

We Who Are About To… is Russ’s penultimate novel; she hadn’t even turned forty yet, but her fiction output would slow almost to a dead halt by the time the ’70s ended. This is my second Russ novel, as I had read Picnic on Paradise, her debut, and honestly I didn’t have much fun with that. The subject of today’s review isn’t fun either, but then again it would probably be insulted if you had a good time with it in the conventional sense. It’s a contender for the darkest SF novel of the ’70s, which I suppose is a point of praise. If you have a history of suicide ideation like I do then you’ll have a very bad time with Russ’s novel.

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 was published in the February 1976 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. I’ve said before where you can find We Who Are About To… in book form, just check out my review for Part 1. I will say, the Feburary 1976 issue might be the most essential Baen-era issue of Galaxy that we have; it ticks all the boxes. We have a science article by Jerry Pournelle, a story by Larry Niven, a book review column by Spider Robinson, as well as pieces by daring young authors like John Varley and P. J. Plauger. And then we have Russ, who might stick out like a sore thumb, but I like said, Baen liked Russ, and he also liked paying lip service to explicitly leftist authors.

Enhancing Image

At the end of Part 1, the nameless narrator killed most of the party, excepting Mrs. Graham and her adopted daughter Lori. I didn’t bring up the fact that Lori is adopted in my review of Part 1 because I didn’t really think it mattered—and it doesn’t! Except on a symbolic narrator, which the narrator makes clear to us. The Grahams married for money, then “bought” a child with their wealth, painting them as delusional petit bourgeois, though they don’t do anything that I would say is too bad. Mr. Graham is a decent fellow and his death (via natural causes) in Part 1 is the closest the narrator comes to actually relating to another person who isn’t Cassie; sure, she treats Lori well (before she kills her), but that’s just being nice. At first I thought the narrator being so unlikable was an oversight on Russ’s part, but Part 2 showed me that this assessment was mistaken.

Returning to the campsite, the narrator kills a now justifiably furious Mrs. Graham with her own gun (Mrs. Graham probably never having handled a gun before), and proceeds to use the gas pellet gun on Lori, killing her instantly and relatively bloodlessly. “You must not shoot Lori with a large-caliber revolver. It’s not right.” This is all in the first few pages of Part 2, and the narrator, having done in everyone, is now left completely on her own. You may notice that we still have a little over thirty magazine pages to go at this point and the novel has become a one-woman show: it’s not as bad as it sounds, but it’s also not… great? The novel stumbles to its predetermined conclusion, but being stuck with just the narrator proves to not be the kiss of death I feared it would.

In Part 1, the narrator isn’t reflecting as much as she’s interacting with other characters, and much like Hamlet she seems to mess with other people intentionally: she claims to have been a “neo-Christian” but also a communist at one point, and everything she says is cloaked in hateful snark. An indicator of when the novel was written is that the narrator comes off like a burnt-out former hippie, with her idealism crushed under what would’ve in the real world been the gas shortage, Watergate, etc. Much like John Lude, the bureaucrat who thinks himself an intellectual, the narrator’s actual humanity is closed off from other eyes, her snarky antagonism being a foil to John’s calm smugness, or rather John is a foil to the narrator. Now that John is dead, along with everyone else, the narrator has nobody left to take her antagonism out on, though that doesn’t stop her from trying!

The realization that she is now by definition the loneliest person in the universe does not hit her immediately. It also doesn’t occur to her until some days in that starving yourself to death might be the slowest way to die possible. Oh sure, she could use her gas pellet gun on her self, or one of a myriad of poisons, or drown herself, but starving will do just fine. “I shall be bored to death long before I starve.” Indeed. As both the narrator and the reader try to fight off the onset of boredom, we get one of those old chestnuts of stranded astronaut stories: hallucinations! The most sustained hallucination is a mock trial in which the dead members of the party dunk on the narrator for killing them, seemingly with no better a justification thant she didn’t like them. These dialogues are all in the narrator’s head, though, something she acknowledges repeatedly.

There’ll be hallucinations about being rescued, I know: croaking thinly, “no, let me die!” (with immense dignity, of course) and I’m carried out to a shuttlecraft by great, coarse, strong, disgustingly healthy people in uniforms with thick necks. Actually it would be a little awkward trying to explain what happened to the others.

You killed them. Why?

They were trying to kill me.

Why?

To prevent me.

From doing what?

Dying.

It’s hard to not frame the narrator killing off most of the party as unforgivably heinous, even if she did it to retain some level of personal freedom in what she saw as a hopeless situation anyway. The thing is, I would’ve actually been more on the narrator’s side if her antagaonism resulted from the men in the party wanting to turn the women into breeding stock, but while there is a conversation in Part 1 about “repopulating,” the moral black hole of procreating without consent never takes center stage in the novel. The narrator is also maybe a lesbian, and at most this would be subliminal since we don’t get much at all from her regarding her orientation, despite the circumstances in Part 1 calling for transparency with that sort of thing. Of course it’s tempting to project Russ’s lesbianism onto the narrator, but I really do think the novel’s deconstruction of survival for its own sake would’ve been more effective if the narrator’s views on sex and relationships were made clearer.

Part 2 is arguably stronger than the first installment because we actually get some insight into the narrator’s motives and how she sees herself. It took long enough, but the novel does eventually become something like a character study, since the plot has basically ended only a fraction into Part 2 and we (and the narrator) are stuck with the protracted aftermath. If you’re a reader who favors plot then the latter half of We Who Are About To… will probably make you pull your hair out, but if you’re much more into character and/or thematic depth like myself then you’ll have more to chew on in the latter half. The other characters were little more than caricatures anyway, so dedicating so much wordage to the one character who might have some real human depth was a good move, even if it was made on what I would argue was a fundamentally flawed premise.

In other words, it sort of pans out, but I don’t think this novel should’ve been—well, a novel. Certainly it could be a novella, but even as a short novel I don’t think it justifies itself.

There Be Spoilers Here

The narrator dies. The end.

This time there really isn’t much more to be said. I’ll take this as a moment to clarify something, because I think there’s a timeline very similar to ours where We Who Are About To… came out as a 30,000-word novella and not a 50,000-word novel, and it would’ve been much stronger while being just as light on plot. The story continues past the point where the narrator has killed everyone, but the plot basically ends halfway through the novel—the plot, or any plot, being a sequence of events. There is action in a plot. That’s not to say something light on events is lacking in depth or even entertainment value; one of my least favorite criticisms of anything is when someone disses it for basically not having a theatrical (or cinematic) three-act structure. A work of art doesn’t have to hit a set quota of plot beats in order to be of enduring value. One of the most experimental and boundary-pushing novels of all time, James Joyce’s Ulysses, has very little in the way of plot, but the nuances of Joyce’s prose, his references, and the psychology of his characters, have been studied for quite literally a century now.

Here’s another example, and this one is directly SF-related: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren. Delany’s novel is mostly, on its surface, 800 pages of druggy sex and totally-not-hippie artists discussing the nature of art and reality, but when taken past its mere plot it becomes a dense and wide-ranging fable about what might happen when a society tries to rebuild itself while being physically and culturally cut off from the rest of the world. You could hit all the plot beats in a quarter of the word count, but you would lose the juiciness of its meditations and allusions in the process. There’s a peculiar charm to a long rambling novel, but Russ’s novel is short, and it can afford to be even shorter. Russ doesn’t allow her characters, not even the narrator, to take on the human dimensions of Delany’s or Joyce’s, nor does she enchant the text with aesthetic flourishes except in short bursts.

The result is a novel that’s paradoxically short and yet long-winded. The narrator spends so much time starving that she eventually gives up and opts to put both herself and the reader out of her misery with poison. Having turned in her membership card to the human race with first her thorny attitude and then the murders (a mistake she realizes too late to remedy), she bids a final farewell (to herself, if nobody else) in the very last sentence fragment. There’s a line not long before that when she brings up a brief and incisive neo-Christian saying, which encapsulates the narrator’s relationship with the rest of the party as well as her failure to appreciate what little of humanity she had left.

I’ll tell you the neo-christian theory of love. The neo-Christian theory of love is this:

There is little of it. Use it where it’s effective.

It was a life poorly lived.

A Step Farther Out

Do I like this novel? Hmmmmm. Is it a novel that’s meant to be liked? Obviously there are people who are fond of it; it actually has a higher rating on Goodreads than The Female Man. But I don’t see We Who Are About To… as a novel to be enjoyed so much as a novel to be argued with. If you’re totally behind Russ’s apparent feelings on stranded astronaut and Adam & Eve plots (she loathes them) then you’ll at least like the novel on paper, but you’ll still have to contend with how it reads.

I have to admire making a protagonist so unlikable, and to have us be stuck inside the head of said protagonist, but we only begin to understand what her deal is once the excess weight of the rest of the cast has been expelled. This is not a novel that tries to win you over from the beginning; rather, this is the kind of novel that wants you to work for it a little. Again, I can respect that, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy reading it. I hate few things more than when a work of art dares me to experience it, like the experience is a game and I can only “win” if I refuse to play. I’ve been hesitant to check out Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream for the same reason, despite the praise. If a novel, by the nature of its premise, is not meant to be read but to be thought about then why read it? The act of reading should be pleasurable, not just a challenge.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

I respect Russ’s novel, but I don’t “like” it. If you’re one to search for transgressive ’60s and ’70s SFF novels, though, then I would go so far as to say We Who Are About To… is a hidden gem, even by the standards of that niche.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Don’t Look Now” by Henry Kuttner

November 10th, 2022

(Cover by Earle Bergey. Startling Stories, March 1948.)

Who Goes There?

Henry Kuttner began writing pretty young, being first published in either 1931 or 1936 (ISFDB claims the former, but something tells me they’re wrong), the latter at the very least introducing Kuttner under his own name to the world of SFF with “The Graveyard Rats.” Said story, a pretty solid one-man show about rats and claustrophobia, has been very recently adapted into an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Kuttner would come to define himself, though, not as a practitioner of horror, but of humor, though the two are not always mutually exclusive. In the late ’30s he wrote prolifically, but not with a whole lot of success; he became known as one of many hack writers for the pulps, but unlike most of them he really did have talent lurking underneath. 1940 was a watershed year for Kuttner, as he married fellow writer C. L. Moore (they both got their start in Weird Tales, and Kuttner started as a big fan of hers), and together they wrote an impressive streak of SFF that remains essential.

While he more or less worked in collaboration with his wife (and vice versa) for the rest of his career, Kuttner would continue to write on his own (essentially if not quite literally) after 1940. Mostly outside of Astounding Science Fiction, Kuttner had stories submitted under his name alone, presumably because magazines like Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories were less reputable, and also because these stories were deemed more Kuttner-y than his more outright collaborations with Moore. After 1950, Kuttner’s productivity dropped to about one story a year (the same happened with Moore, as they both focused on their education), and unfortunately it never recovered; Kuttner died of a failed heart in 1958, only 42 years old. To quote Brian Aldiss (or maybe it’s David Wingrove) from Trillion Year Spree, “Our own minds were extinguished a little in response.”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1948 issue of Startling Stories, which is on the Archive. “Don’t Look Now” has been reprinted a good number of times, at least one of which, My Best Science Fiction Story, is also on the Archive; actually there are two versions of this anthology, and thankfully the version that’s archived, the abridged version, still has Kuttner’s story. More importantly, we have an introduction by Kuttner himself explaining why it’s his “best” story—and look, I normally don’t look for authors’ comments on their own work, but this is glorious. I won’t quote the whole thing, but it’s so deliciously sarcastic—it alone would be worth the price of admission.

Why I selected Don’t Look Now as my favorite science fiction story is because it has the technical accuracy of Jules Verne; the realism of H. G. Wells, the social implications of Tolstoi (Leo—the Count, I mean), the freedom of Laurence Sterne, and the terseness of the Bible (the King James translation, of course).

These comparisons are BULLSHIT and Kuttner knows it. He takes apart the idea of an artist choosing their own favorite work and by extension the idea of making an anthology out of such a premise. He then finishes with the cherry on top: “Anyway, my wife wrote it.” Almost certainly untrue, by the way; after having read it I can say “Don’t Look Now” feels like a Kuttner story through and through. Kuttner’s really playing with the reader here, a forecasting of what will be an almost (if not equally) just as subversive a story.

Right, other reprints. The Great SF Stories: 1948, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; by extension we also have The Golden Years of Science Fiction: Fifth Series, being an amalgamation of The Great SF Stories: 1947 and 1948. More curiously perhaps we have The History of the Science Fiction Magazine Part 3: 1946-1955, edited by Mike Ashley, which despite sounding like a non-fiction series is actually an anthology series. The most essential reprint is, of course, Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, which I brought up in my review of Moore’s story “Daemon” and which I recently managed to get my hands on. All seem to be out of print, but given that you have at least two free online resources I don’t think it’s a bad deal at all.

Enhancing Image

This is a barroom story, which is how you know it’s good. A lot of shit goes down in bars, whether it be between strangers or friends. We meet Lyman, our protagonist, who’s a bit of ~~a weirdo~~ an eccentric, making conversation with a man in a brown suit (let’s just call him the brown man, he doesn’t have a name), and things get a little weird right off the bat. Lyman starts talking about Martians, and how Martians live among us, and how everyone has a Martian whose job is to look after them and make sure they stay in line. Lyman’s Martian happens to be on break, how convenient. He also had been tailing the brown man all day, which is totally not creepy. The fact that the brown man doesn’t hightail it out of there simply because of Lyman’s weirdness perhaps says more about the brown man than it does about Lyman.

Not that the brown man is just some guy Lyman found off the street, he’s a journalist, which you’ll notice is a running thing in old-timey SF especially; if something “out there” is afoot then there’s a good chance a journalist will get involved. Lyman himself is supposedly an inventor. An accident involving “supersonic detergents” went awry and resulted in Lyman’s brain getting rewired, altering his senses such that he could now see and hear Martians—to an extent. He still doesn’t know what they really look like; they apparently walk around in human skin suits. That’s right, this story has actual skinwalkers. Reptilians who secretly rule the world. All that good stuff. Now Lyman is the Man Who Knows Better™, and he’s out to spread the word!

Did the movie They Live take after this? Is this plagiarism?

Anyway, given the alien invasion craze of the ’50s (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers), it’s surprising to me that “Don’t Look Now” was published in 1948, since it feels partly like a commentary on all those alien invasion stories. While there is a fine layer of paranoia coating things, there’s also a good deal of humor, as is typical of Kuttner. We get a reference to the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds—you know, the radio drama that allegedly convinced thousands of people that there was an actual alien invasion going on. According to Lyman it was obviously fiction, but the novel the radio drama was adapting? Maybe not so much. “With Orson It was just a gag. H. G. knew—or suspected.” Again I’m surprised this was published in 1948 and not 1958, because it feels like the kind of self-aware takedown that would come about after a fad’s run its course.

Lyman also has the notion that cats were actually the ones who ran the world before the Martians, and they can even detect Martians as well. As someone who has (not owns) two cats, I find this credible enough.

Truth be told, it’s hard to talk too much about “Don’t Look Now,” for a few reasons. It’s probably the shortest short story I’ve reviewed so far, and I actually worried its length would be a problem; it’s only half a dozen magazine pages long, which translates to about a dozen book pages. Okay, that’s too bad. The thing is that it’s also chatty. This shit is like My Dinner with Andre if it was written by Thomas Pynchon, it’s a little gonzo and it almost feels mashed together. And because the vast majority of it is dialogue, with just two characters in one location, you might get the impression that nothing happens, which in a way is true. The stakes aren’t too high. We don’t suddenly break out into an action sequence. The Martians don’t barge in and wreak havoc. I know that’s entering spoiler territory, but I just wanna set the right expectations, because “Don’t Look Now” works almost like a Socratic dialogue—with a twist at the end, of course.

As such, this is my shortest review thus far; I’d be a little embarrassed if it wasn’t. Which is not to say the story is dull, or that it’s bad. Quite the contrary! Kuttner’s economy of style is empeccable; he does not waste any time and he doesn’t try to “elevate” it with flowery descriptions. Kuttner’s strength lies in punchy storytelling, so even though virtually nothing happens in “Don’t Look Now,” you don’t get the sense that Kuttner is just spinning his wheels, though you may be wondering what he’s up to. There’s definitely a point, but it’s saved for the very end, which naturally is where we’d get to spoilers. I’ll just say here that the story’s sense of paranoia lives up to the paranoia implied in its title, even if it is a bit jokey about it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The ending changes everything. Up to this point we’ve been led to believe that there’s a Martian in the bar, and that anyone could be it. Is it the brown man? The barkeep? Someone we were not aware of until now? No, it turns out that the Martian is… Lyman himself.

Lyman sat there. Between two wrinklesi n his forehead there was a stir and a flicker of lashes unfurling. The third eye opened slowly and looked after the brown man.

He was telling the truth about at least one thing: Martians have a third eye that they keep hidden. Most of everything else is probably a lie. The explanation about Martians appearing in infrared pictured has to be a lie. We’re still not sure what the Martians really look like. Lyman, since he is the protagonist and viewpoint character, has been taken for granted with regards to his trustworthiness, but we find out at the very end that the person who supposedly knows about aliens living among us is actually an alien himself. There’s even a subtle misdirect right before the final line where it looks like the barkeep might reveal himself as a Martian, but this is a red herring. Rarely do yoo come across a story where a good 90% of it is a red herring, come to think of it; the final reveal makes us doubt ourselves.

This raises a peculiar question, though: Why in God’s name did Lyman tell the brown man about Martians in the first place? What did he have to gain from it? Why would he rat out his own race like that? Unless, of course, you assume most of what he said was wrong on purpose; that he was giving the brown man just enough cookie crumbs to become paranoid about alien overlords, but then steered him off the patch by giving false information. Now why would someone in power deliberately give out misinformation? Hmmm. Not to mentions it explains Lyman’s erratic behavior before, which is revealed to have been very much calcualted. It would’ve been too easy for Lyman to get caught by a Martian, given he’s not being exactly secretive about his findings, so Kuttner does the smart thing and makes the Martian the last person we would suspect.

In “Don’t Look Now” we don’t see the solving of a mystery but the planting of one. You know how in Inception their normal job is extraction, which is to steal information from people’s dreams, but plnating false info is much harder? Lyman and Kuttner do that, and they do it pretty well.

A Step Farther Out

If “Don’t Look Now” feels somehow minor it’s because it’s set on so small a stage. There are only two principal characters and most of the word count is dedicated to their dialogue. Hell, only one of the characters is given a name. It’s all rather theatrical, like a one-act play. For a while I wondered where it was going, or rather what the point of it was, but I have to say the ending makes up for the lack of immediate point; it’s the kind of twist that makes you look back on the rest of the story and try to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle you’ve been given. Kuttner, more than anything, is clever, and he waits for the perfect moment to pull the rug out from under you. I would consider it his best, but I think it encapsulates what separates a Kuttner story from a Moore story.

In the years following World War II, there was an uptick in paranoid SF, projecting fears about nuclear weapons, the newfangled Cold War, or both. “Don’t Look Now” belongs to a certain subset of SF story from that period, leaning into the anxieties of the era and presenting something like an allegory. I don’t know where Kuttner stands on the issue of the Cold War, about the possibility of Soviety infiltrators in the US, the ending not really clarifying anything on that front, but I think that lack of clear intention only adds to the intrigue. While published in 1948, this is very much indicative of social anxieties prevalent in ’50s American SF. I would check it out, especially if you’re a sucker for that breed of fiction like I am.

See you next time.