Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

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estate has been stingy about looking the other way for online reprints, so when seeing if an Anderson story has been archived it’s a real flip of the coin.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.
Serial Review: We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ (Part 1/2)

November 6th, 2022

(Cover by Rick Sternbach. Galaxy, January 1976.)

Who Goes There?

The ’60s saw an influx of explicitly feminist SFF writers, in correspondence with the sexual revolution of the period, with authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Kate Wilhelm (although the latter had debuted in the late ’50s) coming to prominence. Perhaps the most abrasive of these new voices in the field was Joanna Russ, whose professional debut was in 1959 and who really hit the scene with her classic vampire story “My Dear Emily” in 1962. Her series of stories about Alyx the barbarian are of interest for a few reasons: first was the novelty of having a female protagonist in what amounted to heroic fantasy, and the second was that said heroic fantasy hopscotched its way between that genre and science fiction. What made Russ most famous (or infamous), though, was her 1975 novel The Female Man, which had apparently been written half a decade earlier but remained shelved until then. Russ, in both her fiction and her criticism (she, along with Judith Merril, was considered one of old-timey SFF’s great critics), was a real warrior with the pen—her combativeness earned her some enemies, but also much respect.

Due to health problems, Russ’s output petered out after the ’70s, and her career as a novelist was short-lived, with her first and last novels (Picnic on Paradise and The Two of Them, respectively) being published only a decade apart. She did, however, get some awards recognition, winning the Hugo for Best Novella with her 1982 novella “Souls,” which, though people must not have figured it at the time, had come out during Russ’s twilight years as a fiction writer. Still, as arguably the most outwardly spoken vanguard of second-wave feminism in relation to SFF, it’s possible that by 1985 Russ had said pretty much everything she wanted to say. While she lived until 2011, Russ’s legacy is very much conjoined to prevailing feminist modes of thought in the ’60s and ’70s.

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 of We Who Are About To… was published in the January 1976 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. I assumed that this novel would be out of print, but this is not so! There’s a paperback from Wesleyan University Press that looks like it’s still in print, and the same goes for a more recent paperback from Penguin Books; yes, apparently Penguin thought We Who Are About To… was significant enough to give it a fresh printing. Of course, the Wesleyan edition is superior by virtue of not being British. Keep in mind also that this is a very short novel—170 pages in its first edition and just under 120 in the Wesleyan, almost making it a novella really.

It could’ve been even shorter, I’m just saying.

Just as interestingly, this was published in Galaxy during that period when Jim Baen was editor. Baen was a truly remarkably editor, one of the all-time greats, but it’s funny to see a serial by leftist firebrand Joanna Russ in the same issue as pieces by such grumpy right-wing stalwarts as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; mind you, Baen’s fondness for out-of-left-field (pun intended) authors like Russ and Le Guin paled in comparison to his devotion to the conversative/libertarian crowd.

Enhancing Image

Before we get into the actual plot, let’s talk about a niche but weirdly prolific and popular subgenre, if you can even call it a subgenre: the stranded astronaut story. You know the drill, it’s when an astronaut (or at least someone who is spacefaring) gets stranded in some hostile environment and has to find a way either call for rescue and live in that new environment. Even by 1976, when Russ’s novel was serialized, this was a real old chestnut of the genre, and evidently it continues to be hugely popular in the present day if The Martian is anything to go by. Name an SF author and they probably wrote a stranded astronaut story at some point, and more often than not such a story is fundamentally optimistic about the prospect of humanity surviving amongst the stars. Such a premise is very much Campbellian, and while it didn’t start in John W. Campbell’s Astounding, it appeals to that sensibility.

We Who Are About To… does not hold such an optimistic view of humanity being able to overcome such obstacles; this is a novel that basically tells us right at the beginning that everyone will be dead by the end, so I’m not counting that as a spoiler, since it’s all but predestined. You may be wondering what I’m gonna do about the spoilers section, since I always have that for these reviews: don’t worry, you’ll see. You may also be wondering what the point is of Russ introducing us to these characters that she’s pointing at and saying, “Hehe, I’m gonna fucking KILL them by the end of this!” Well, you know what they say about the journey and the destination; more importantly, this novel would not be able to justify its own existence if it didn’t result in a kill-’em-all type of ending. Let’s pretend, though, for a second that we might get invested in these people.

Now, as for the characters…

There are eight of them at the outset, but only maybe half of them really matter. Five women and three men, and one of those women is very much underage (there’s a ’70s-ism here that I don’t feel like getting into, except to say that putting barely-in-their-teens characters in sexually compromising situations seemed like something you just did as an SFF writer in that era), not to mention a daughter of one of the other women. We have Mr. and Mrs. Graham and their daughter Lori, Cassie, Nathalie, Alan, John, and the unnamed female narrator. John is possibly the most interesting of the bunch since he acts as kind of a foil to the narrator, thinking himself an intellectual when in reality he’s a know-nothing bureaucrat. Alan is the youngest of the men and the closest the novel has to a conventional antagonist; he’s the only one who, prior to Part 1’s climax, resorts to physixal violence. Nathalie is a bit of a nonentity while Cassie is the closest (aside from Lori) the narrator has to an ally in all this. Not that that means much.

Our Heroes™, as part of an interplanetary expedition gone awry, crash land on what is probably a “tagged” planet, which is to say a planet whose makeup is not immediately fatal to humans. So it’s more habitable than Mars, which is something. Left with only the remains of their vessel, a land rover (or something like it), and some supplies, it’s time for the group to get their act together and see if they can make the best of a bad situation. They may as well get used to it since they have no way of calling for help and the planet itself is so distant from human civilization that help is simply not coming. But it can’t be all bad, can it? Well, the narrator thinks it’s all bad.

John Ude said, “Come on now, come on, dears. It’s a tagged planet. It has to be. Too much coincidence otherwise, eh? The air, the gravity. Now if it’s tagged, that means it’s like Earth. And we know Earth. Most of us were bom on it. So what’s there to be afraid of, hey? We’re just colonizing a little early, that’s all. You wouldn’t be afraid of Earth, would you?’’

Oh, sure. Think of Earth. Kind old home. Think of the Arctic. Of Labrador. Of Southern India in June. Think of smallpox and plague and earthquakes and ringworm and pit vipers. Think of a nice case of poison ivy all over, including your eyes. Status Asthmaticus. Amoebic dysentery. The Minnesota pioneers who tied a rope from the house to the barn in winter because you could lose your way in a blizzard and die three feet from the house. Think (while you’re at it) of tsunamis, liver fluke, the Asian brown bear. Kind old home. The sweetheart. The darling place.

The narrator has a snarky sense of humor—humor which, if absent, would render the novel borderline unreadable. The snark helps both the character and the reader cope with how hopeless things are. The narrator proceeds to list all the problems with a “tagged” planet and how basically nobody in the group is equipped to live long-term on such a planet, let alone set up a colony. Think of how many parts of our world are uninhabitable and compare that to a planet Our Heroes™ know nothing about, and whose very water could be lethal to humans. Something that constantly gets ignored or handwaved in these stranded astronaut stories is how fucking difficult (i.e., impossible) it would actually be to live in an environment that’s not suited for human habitation. While I have my issues with Russ’s novel, its mission statement as a strong dose of anti-Campbellian SF is admirable, even if I find it far too pessimistic for its own good. I do often prefer my SF to be at least a bit more hopepilled, just saying.

While the narrator is incessantly bitchy, her fatalistic viewpoint (we may as well play Uno until we die of starvation) is not unfounded. As far as she’s concerned, everyone died in the crash (not physically, but more metaphysically) and all this talk of setting up a colony is just delaying the inevitable. She might be more invested in survival if, say, they were literally the last human beings in the universe and if they didn’t procreate then the race would die out, but something tells me even if that was the case her response would still be “meh.” Naturally this attitude does not vibe well with the rest of the group, and she’s soon treated as a buzzkill at best and some kind of antisocial deviant at worst.

Take this little exchange between the narrator and John (again), which is easily one of my favorite bits of dialogue in Part 1:

“Civilization must be preserved,’’ says he.

“Civilization’s doing fine,’’ I said. “We just don’t happen to be where it is.’’

To say the narrator is thorny would be putting it mildly. Assuming the doom-and-gloom premise doesn’t alienate you, the total unlikability of the protagonist (even calling her an anti-heroine doesn’t feel right) just might, and I suspect is also the big reason why contemporary reviewers were not kind to the novel. It would be one thing if the narrator was set in her ways and she just wanted to be left to her own devices, but those dumb fellow humans keep trying to rope her back in, but she’s so nasty to everyone (except the Grahams, and even with them she’s standoffish) that we’re not sure why the others would want to keep her. The most plausible explanation is that they need everyone they can get, even the person who refuses to cooperate, if they hope to rebuild on this strange new planet, but I feel like it’s possible to do without just one person, especially if that person is a huge pain to be around.

Indeed, while the narrator is not without redeeming qualities, the conflict is only allowed to happen because she, for some reason, refuses to just take a hike and kill herself in peace, at least sparing everyone else the trouble. The whole idea is that she wants to die, since she sees no point in living under such dire circumstances, yet she keeps going. Oh, there are attempts from the others to keep the narrator from hurting herself, but she still has plenty of opportunities, not to mention means, of ending her own life, yet she can’t do it. She has a gas pellet gun which she can load with poison and enough drugs on her person to take down an elephant or two, so it shouldn’t be that hard. Of course, the narrator’s lack of drive to do what she herself thinks ought to be done is probably the point, which finally brings us to…

There Be Spoilers Here

Most of them die. End of Part 1.

…..

…………..

……………………

Okay, there’s more to it than that.

I can’t remember now when it happened exactly, but I realized that the narrator reminded me of a certain other character, and while I wasn’t expecting the comparison, it makes total sense to me now. I’m talking about Hamlet. The doomed prince of Denmark was a revolutionary character in theatrical storyteller, and, being innovative, he’s easy to poke fun at. The tragedy of Hamlet is that he is a man who is all thought and no action; every action he takes in the place is either misguided or comes about too late. To have the protagonist of your tragedy spend so much of the story saying so much and doing so little is probably frustrating for a lot of modern readers/viewers, but consider how unique Hamlet is as possibly the first true introvert in the history of theatre. The tragic hero, no matter how doomed, is typically a person who acts, while Hamlet is a person who thinks.

Similarly, the narrator of We Who Are About To… spends so much of her time thinking and so little time doing, so much so that the violent confrontation at the end of Part 1 struck me as more action-packed than it really was. The narrator is forced to take action against the rest of the group once she had literally nowhere left to run, resulting in her killing John, Alan, and Nathalie, and with Cassie, opting to do the reasonable thing and no longer put up with the narrator’s bullshit, killing herself. Had the narrator done so herself earlier, none of this would have happened, but like Hamlet she either acts in the wrong way or too late. Also like Hamlet, she thinks about suicide a good amount, and while I have to think of the novel’s pro-suicide (or at the very least pro-euthanasia) stance as almost more a shock tactic than an actual argument Russ is making, I also think it makes sense that she would (like Hamlet) struggle to go through with shuffling off this mortal coil.

The narrator being a Hamlet-esque figure does something to explain (if not to justify totally) her constant antagonism toward the rest of the group, not to mention her obsession with death. It’s all engaging on a thematic level, and it’s nice to think about—I just wish I could say the same for it as a reading experience.

A Step Farther Out

Part 1 ending where it does immediately brings up a structural problem, since by this point most of the cast is dead and there’s frankly not much than can happen from this point onward. At the end of Part 1 it feels more like we’re approaching the last third, or even the last quarter of the novel, and not the second half. It’s also a problem of length, since even taking into account how short it already is, I can’t help but feel like We Who Are About… can stand to be even shorter; it would be feasible, possibly even desirable, to whittle this 50,000-word novel (I would say Part 1 is about 25,000 words) down to a 30,000-word novella without sacrificing the important things. After all, we don’t need this many characters who inevitably will be snuffed out, nor do we need to know too much about them aside from how they figure into (i.e., oppose) the narrator’s viewpoint. Also, while I do find some of the narrator’s snark mildly funny, there’s only so much of her ultra-pessimistic unlikability that I can stomach.

Despite my reservations, I am curious as to how Russ plans to justify what looks to be mostly a one-woman show in the novel’s back half, and how that might impact my enjoyment of the whole thing as opposed to just admiring its thematic audacity. I’ve been burned before.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Another Orphan” by John Kessel

November 3rd, 2022

(Cover by Barclay Shaw. F&SF, September 1982.)

Who Goes There?

John Kessel is one of the defining SFF authors of the ’80s, although like many of his contemporaries he had debuted in the ’70s, in the likes of Galileo and Galaxy Science Fiction. Adjacent to the newfangled cyberpunk movement of the period but decidedly not a cyberpunk writer himself, Kessel, like close contemporary Bruce Sterling, is startlingly diverse in his output. His 1986 story “The Pure Product” is one of the more haunting explorations of time travel in modern SFF, and his slightly autobiographhical story “Buffalo” could lay claim to being one of the best short stories (inside or outside of SFF) of the ’90s. On top of his fiction, Kessel is an active genre critic and anthologist, the latter often in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. While he has a few novels to his credit, Kessel has reserved most of his writing energy to short fiction and genre commentary.

“Another Orphan” is a relatively early outing from Kessel, but as we’ll see, it reads like the work of a stone-cold master. I should say it now so that I won’t have to ease you into it in some coy fashion: this is Moby Dick fanfiction. You may be thinking, “Now Brian, this is obviously not fanfiction!” I guess you’re right; it was, after all, published professionally, and so technically it doesn’t count. But “Another Orphan” is about an original character being plopped into a story that was first written by a different author, a premise which has since become an old and tired chestnut for fanfic writers. It’s what Kessel does with such a premise, though, that makes the result special.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Despite winning a Nebula, and being regarded as one of Kessel’s most major works, “Another Orphan” has not been reprinted often. Still, we have two options that I would consider major. The first is The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Edward L. Ferman, which is a bulky hardcover that you can find used pretty cheaply, and it also has a lot of stories that I consider of strong interest. More recently (so recent it came out THIS YEAR!) we have The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel, a fancy hardcover from Subterranean Press, which I would recommend if you’re already a fan of Kessel and/or you wanna play this game on Hard Mode. Limited edition with copies signed by Kessel himself, so you’re looking at at least $30, and that price will only go up with time.

Enhancing Image

A bit of context, because while it’s not necessary to have read Moby Dick in order to enjoy “Another Orphan,” the latter is very much in conversation with the former. Herman Melville is one of the great eccentrics in American literature, and especiallty 19th century American literally; his magnum opus, Moby Dick, is a bizarre, freewheeling, often meandering novel that alienates a lot of readers because at face value it seems to fail as an adventure narrative, when the reality is that Moby Dick, if anything, is a grand subversion of the seafaring adventure narrative. If you go in expecting what you imagine a canonical work to read like, or if you’re expecting an action-packed romp on the high seas, you’ll be disappointed, but if you’re expecting one of the weirdest and most enigmatic novels in American literature then you might come out of it with a new perspective on what is possible with the written word.

I say all this because our protagonist, Patrick Fallon, is someone who, once he realizes where he is and what he’s in, does not initially give the world of Moby Dick the respect it deserves. Patrick is a commodities analyst for some firm (let’s just call him a yuppie and be done with it) who, after a fight and an apology fuck with his girlfriend (I don’t think they’re married) one night, inexplicably finds himself awaking in the crew’s quarters on a whaling vessel—and not just any whaling vessel! He doesn’t immediately figure it out (he at first thinks it’s a dream, or that he got shanghaied), but he soon realizes that he’s on the Pequod, the doomed ship in Moby Dick that hunts the white whale for three days before being smashed to smitheroons, with only one survivor. Which is a bit of a problem.

Oh right, spoilers for Moby Dick, which is now over 170 years old and whose plot beats a lot of (at least American) readers are familiar with. I know some people are very sensitive about spoilers, but you have to draw a line somewhere. It’s like telling a grad student that Santa Claus isn’t real.

They had been compelled to read Moby Dick in the junior-year American Renaissance class he’d taken to fulfill the last of his Humanities requirements. Fallon remembered being bored to tears by most of Melville’s book, struggling with his interminable sentences, his wooly speculations that had no bearing on the story; he remembered being caught up by parts of that story. He had seen the movie with Gregory Peck. Richard Basehart, king of the sci-fi flicks, had played Ishmael. Fallon had not seen anyone who looked like Richard Basehart on this ship. The mate, Flask—he remembered that name now. He remembered that all the harpooners were savages. Queequeg.

He remembered that in the end, everyone but Ishmael died.

I appreciate the shoutout to the John Huston movie, which, by the way, was written by Ray Bradbury. The more you know…

The first thing I thought of when reading “Another Orphan” was actually L. Ron Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky, in which a musician somehow gets sucked into the world of his hack writer friend’s latest novel, in which he’s given the role of the villain. The thing is, of course, that said hack writer always kills off his villains at the end, which means our guy has to find some way to get (or at least alter events so as to avoid his doom) before it’s too late, and there’s a similar ticking-clock element in “Another Orphan.” Just know, though, that while there’s a bit of snarky humor at work, Kessel’s story is a good deal more serious than Hubbard’s, and a lot more thematically ambitious despite having half the word count.

Patrick, interestingly, is not put in the place of Ishmael, but he’s not in the place of some other preexisting character either; he’s known to the whalemen as Patrick Fallon, as if he had always been on the ship, although he’s treated like a bit of an outsider. He’s also not very strong, physically, which presents a problem when trying to fit in as a sailor on a ship full of sweaty hardened whalers. (I wanna go on a slight tangent about the homosexuality or rather the lasck of it. Moby Dick is infamously a pretty homoerotic novel, unintentionally or by design, but Patrick is straight as an arrow and he doesn’t speculate even slightly about homoerotic activity that might sprout between men who go out on a sailing vessel for months on end. Kessel’s story comments on or challenges a lot of things about Moby Dick, but that’s not one of them.) The situation only gets worse when he inevitably encounters the captain of the ship: Ahab.

And boy, Ahab’s flamboyance (really his campiness) does not disappoint. Patrick assumes, though (incorrectly, as it turns out), that Ahab is a caricature because of his maniacal rants. More generally he writes off the heightened atmosphere of the Pequod as unrealistic and silly, partly based on his murky remembrance of the novel and partly because he underestimates Melville’s intentions. A mistake Patrick makes repeatedly is that he fails to respect the artistry and intricacy of the fictional world he’s been thrown into; he thinks that because Ahab is subject to manic episodes and that the sea seemingly conforms to the energy of these episodes (a thunderstorm rages during one of Ahab’s monologues, which Patrick considers on-the-nose) it means these experiences can’t possibly be real. Or can they? Does Ahab’s mania, which to some extent reflects Melville’s own, count as a real experience, and not just scenes of heightened emotion concocted by a writer?

Ahab as represented in Kessel’s story is a pretty interesting character, but I’ll save him for spoilers since his “big scene” is saved for the climax. For now there is the question of Ishmael, and who he is, where he is, and who the hell Patrick is in all this. If you’ve read Moby Dick then you may recall that while Ishmael is the narrator, it would be misleading to call him the protagonist. While the first hundred pages or so have Ishmael as an active presence, once he boards the Pequod he becomes less and less a flesh-and-blood character until, for a good portion of the novel, he basically disappears into vapor. I don’t think there’s a single time while on the Pequod that another character calls Ishmael by his name; he’s a bit of a spook. It takes a minute for the realization that Ishmael is effectively a nonentity, and that he could be anyone on the ship, to hit Patrick.

Then an unsettling realization smothered the hope before it could come fully to bloom: there was not necessarily an Ishmael in the book. “Call me Ishmael,’: it started. Ishmael was a pseudonym for some other man, and there would be no one by that name on the Pequod. Fallon congratulated himself on a clever bit of literary detective work.

Yet the hope refused to remain dead. Yes, there was no Ishmael on the Pequod; or anyone on the ship not specifically named in the book might be Ishmael, any one of the anonymous sailors, within certain broad parameters of age and character—and Fallon wracked his brain trying to remember what the narrator said of himself—might be Ishmael. He grabbed at that; he breathed in the possibility and tried on the suit for size. Why not? If absurdity were to rule to the extent that he had to be there in the first place, then why couldn’t he be the one who lived? More than that, why couldn’t he make himself that man? No one else knew what Fallon knew. He had the advantage over them. Do the things that Ishmael did, and you may be him. If you have to be a character in a book, why not be the hero?

Ishmael is definitely not “the hero,” but that’s beside the point.

Patrick basically has two choices: he can take on the role of Ishmael and hope for the best, or he can find some way to prevent Ahab from going on the three-day hunt for Moby Dick that will doom the ship. Sparking a mutiny would be a high-rick high-reward option, not helped by the fact that with one or two exceptions nobody can stand to be around Patrick, let alone persuaded by him. However, if anyone can be persuaded to go “off script,” then it would be Starbuck, the first mate and the bottom to Ahab’s top. Readers of Moby Dick will remember Starbuck as the well-meaning but ineffectual right-hand man who considers overthrowing Ahab at one point, being well aware of the captain’s mania, but chooses not to through with it. Unfortunately Patrick’s efforts to stoke the fires of rebellion in Starbuck prove unsuccessful, but it seems like these “characters” are ultimately capable of making their own decisions.

At first I was wondering if Kessel genuinely disliked Moby Dick or if it was just Patrick’s snarky narration, but eventually I had to conclude it was the latter. I mean sure, it would make little sense to spill so much ink just to rag on a 170-year-old book, but occasionally it was hard to tell. There’s a scene where Patrick observes the harpooneers (Queequeg, Dagoo, etc.) and how they’re all POC, chocking their roles up to racism—although he’s not clear if it would be due to the ship owners’ racism or Melville’s, though it’s probably the former; Melville, it must be said, was considerably less racist than the average 19th century writer. Unfortunately, in what feels like a bit of a missed opportunity on Kessel’s part, we get practically zero dialogue from the harpooneers, and despite being a modern man with presumably modern-ish sensibilities, Patrick makes no attempt to befriend the harpooneers.

These are criticisms, sure, but they’re really just quibbles, especially in light of the back end of the novella, which is so masterfully done that it made me look back on the rest of the story in awe. The lengths Kessel goes to subvert one’s expectations do not reveal themselves until a good ways in.

There Be Spoilers Here

Normally in this kind of narrative, there’s an explanation for why the protagonist was suddenly taken out of their normal enviornment and plopped into something else; it doesn’t have to be a good explanation, but we would at least get an answer. No such relief for Patrick Fallon. Not only has he so far been unable to avert the ship’s course, but the source of his predicament remains completely mysterious. Is this a Schrodinger’s butterfly scenario? Is the world of the book a horribly elaborate dream, or was his prior life in the “real world” the dream? Which one is real? Could they possibly coexist? Why Moby Dick, a book Patrick had read years ago and wasn’t fond of, of all things? Kessel knowingly piles question upon question and refuses to answer, because to give answers would be to undermine the story’s aura as an existential nightmare.

Why should he not have a choice? Why should that God give him the feeling of freedom if in fact He was directing Fallon’s every breath? Did the Fates weave this trance-like calm blue day to lead Fallon to these particular conclusions, so that not even his thoughts in the end were his own, but only the promptings of some force beyond him? And what force could that be if not the force that created this world, and who created this world but Herman Melville, a man who had been dead for a very long time, a man who had no possible connection with Fallon? And what could be the reason for the motion? If this was the real world, then why had Fallon been given the life he had lived before, tangled himself in, felt trapped within, only to be snatched away and clumsily inserted into a different fantasy? What purpose did it serve? Whose satisfaction was being sought?

What had started out as a whacky misadventure has gradually turned into something more ominous and mysterious, but because of that sense of mystery it also becomes more enthralling. There’s a brief scene where Patrick, inexplicably, wakes up back in his old life, with his girlfriend and his yuppie job and all that, but even at the beginning of that scene something feels off. Before long the world of Moby Dick bleeds into the “real world” and Patrick awakens back on the Pequod, as if the reality of Patrick prior life were waning, giving into the growing reality of Melville’s fiction. The growing disparity between worlds, the diminishing hope of finding a way home, is almost of cosmic proportions. At first Patrick found the operatics of the novel to be unconvincing, but now he thinks them perfectly logical. The fading star of his prior life has become his own white whale.

People don’t realize that Moby Dick is a cosmic horror narrative—possibly the first (and to this day the most experimental) of its kind.

The final scene involves a one-on-one confrontation with Ahab, who while very much a character has not been much of a direct presence thus far. They get into something like an existential debate before a fight breaks out, with Ahab victorious—not just physically the winner, but also spiritually. After all he’s been through, Patrick has come no closer to returning home, indeed now with the Pequod appearing to be where he’s truly supposed to be. The final lines of the story echo those of the novel prior to the epilogue, and some of you might recall that Ishmael reveals himself to have been the ship’s sole survivor in that closing chapter. But no such epilogue exists here. I would say this is an anticlimax, and you could say it is, but it’s too deliberately written to feel like that; the lack of proper closure is necessary to nail home the feeling of existential dread. To cop the final words from the SF Encyclopedia’s entry on Melville (which is surprisingly detailed, given that Melville basically didn’t write any SF), Patrick ultimately finds himself “with no surcease in view, no escape from prison.”

A Step Farther Out

Is it fair to compare a 20,000-word novella to a 200,000-word novel? No, of course not, and I’m not gonna do that. “Another Orphan” is effectively a standalone deal; you’ll miss out on some of the juicy details if you’ve not read Moby Dick, but Patrick provides enough context for things that you probably won’t be confused. But as someone who loves Moby Dick I have to admit I was predisposed to either loving or hating “Another Orphan,” and I’m not sure how one would go about hating it. Kessel, incidentally, was about the same age as Melville (early 30s, which is insane when you consider the intricacies of Moby Dick) when he wrote “Another Orphan,” and part of me wonders if he saw the long-dead author as a kindred spirit. Patrick, on the other hand, while not a villainous character by any means, is what we would call a sellout; he repeatedly says he’s not a hypocrite (which is kind of a weird thing to say about yourself), but clearly he’s lacking in integrity. Maybe it makes sense, then, that a work of pure artistry like Moby Dick would serve as the playground for Patrick’s new purgatorial existence.

Very simple evaluation here. If you want your high seas adventures to be a little more thematically substantive, you’ll like this. If you want an ingeniously constructed fantasy narrative, you’ll like this. If you like Moby Dick, you’ll get a lot out of this. And if you’re a Kessel fan then you’ve probably already read “Another Orphan,” because this is essential reading.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: November 2022

November 1st, 2022
(Cover by Fred Gambino. Asimov’s, August 1996.)

Now we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming! Only not quite, but I’ll save that for the end. We’ve come back to our novella and serial reviews, which I’m thankful for; as fitting as it is to focus only on short stories and novelettes for a month of horror, I found it weirdly draining to review all those short stories back to back. With serials and novellas we’ll have more variety, never mind the lack of a horror theme.

I must’ve gone back and forth on this schedule too many times to count, frankly. The thing is that I like having a schedule for my reviews, as I think it allows me to plan some silly stuff in advance, like the fact that I’ll be tackling Joanna Russ and Poul Anderson stories back-to-back (for those of you who don’t know, I recommend looking up a certain exchange those two reportedly had), not to mention stuff like last month’s review slate. But I’m not here to waste your time, let’s get to the meat of the matter!

For the serials:
1. We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ. Published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January to February 1976. Russ was a divisive figure in the field and We Who Are About To… in particular was not received well. Even so, it has its defenders, perhaps the biggest of them being Samuel R. Delany (who I always trust), and it also received a glowing review from Joachim Boaz over on his site. I have to admit my experiences with Russ have not been great up to this point, having found her Hugo-winning novella “Souls” underwhelming, but this could be a change of pace!
2. We Have Fed Our Sea by Poul Anderson. Published in Astounding Science Fiction, August to September 1958. It was nominated for the Hugo for Best Novel, and was published in book form as The Enemy Stars. Anderson was apparently a beloved figure when he was alive, but since his death his star power has faded somewhat, perhaps due to the scattered vairety of his fiction. He was a reliable and insanely prolific writer, and I often like (but rarely love) his work. We Have Fed Our Sea was one of THREE Anderson serials running in Astounding in 1958.
For the novellas:
1. “Another Orphan” by John Kessel. Published in the September 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kessel can be thought of as adjacent to the cyberpunk movement of the ’80s, though it would be a mistake to consider Kessel himself one of the cyberpunks. Renowned for both his fiction and genre criticism, he’s also edited several anthologies, often in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. “Another Orphan,” which won the Nebula for Best Novella, is apparently a riff on a classic work of American fiction…
2. “The Kragen” by Jack Vance. Published in the July 1964 issue of Fantastic. Like with Poul Anderson, Vance is a writer I often like but rarely find myself strongly attached to. Also like with Anderson, Vance represents to some extent SF writing typical of the pre-New Wave ’60s (i.e., relatively conservative), focusing less on literary experimentation and more on The Big Picture™. “The Kragen” may strike some readers as familiar because they had read it in a different form: it would be expanded into the novel The Blue World two years later.
For the short stories:
1. “Don’t Look Now” by Henry Kuttner. Published in the March 1948 issue of Startling Stories. You didn’t think I’d forget about Kuttner, right? Making his professional debut in 1936, Kuttner was not the instant success like hie future wife, C. L. Moore, was; actually he had a reputation as a hack writer for a while, and to this day his immense talent tends to be undervalued. Alongside Moore Kuttner would write some of the most beloved SFF of the ’40s, but he also remaimed prolific more or less on his own, “Don’t Look Now” being an example.
2. “Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in the August 1996 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Le Guin is one of those grandmasters of the field who really needs no introduction. She only appeared sporadically in the magazines from the ’60s to the ’80s, but the ’90s saw a major resurgance for Le Guin as a magazine presence, with her Hainish cycle especially getting more attention. “Mountain Ways” is a standalone Hainish story, and it won the James Triptree Jr. (now regrettably called the Otherwise) Award for gender-bending SF.
If you’re reading this post and it’s the first day of November then you’ll notice there are two new departments for my blog: one of them is simply a quality-of-life improvement while the other is more of a “I’m doing this for funzies” thing. Firstly we have an author index now! Reviews are organized by authors’ last names, and while this page may be small now, there will come a point when it will be massive, and since I don’t rate my reviews, this is probably the best way to help readers find what they’re looking for. The second is The Observatory, which like Things Beyond is an editorial department, but whereas Things Beyond is meant for forecasting reviews, The Observatory will be more like a conventional magazine editorial where I’ll spend a thousand words on whatever subject I feel like writing about—although, of course, it will be SFF-related.

Since Things Beyond happens at the beginning of every month, it seems only natural to have an Observatory editorial posted on the 15th of every month, so that it’ll never be skipped and it’ll fall exactly between two of my regular review posts. With these changes I feel like I’m one step closer to making my blog a “professional” (by that I really mean well-rounded) review site for magazine SFF.

Won’t you read with me?
The Author Index

November 1st, 2022
Aickman, Robert
- “The Same Dog”
Aldiss, Brian W.
Anderson, Poul
Anthony, Piers
Arnason, Eleanor
- “Checkerboard Planet”
Ashwell, Pauline
- “The Wings of a Bat”
Ballard, J. G.
- “The Voices of Time”
Bear, Elizabeth
- “Shoggoths in Bloom”
Bear, Greg
- “Hardfought”
Beaumont, Charles
- “Free Dirt”
Bester, Alfred
Bishop, Michael
- “The Samurai and the Willows”
Bisson, Terry
- “Bears Discover Fire”
- “First Fire”
Blish, James
- “There Shall Be No Darkness”
Bloch, Robert
- “The Hungry House”
- “The Movie People”
Bradbury, Ray
- “Lorelei of the Red Mist” [with Leigh Brackett]
- “Punishment Without Crime”
Brackett, Leigh
- “Enchantress of Venus”
- “Lorelei of the Red Mist” [with Ray Bradbury]
Brown, Rosel George
- “David’s Daddy”
Brunner, John
Bryant, Edward
- “Strata”
Budrys, Algis
- Hard Landing
- “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night”
Bujold, Lois McMaster
Butler, Octavia E.
- “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”
Campbell, Ramsey
- “The Scar”
Carter, Lin
- “Uncollected Works”
Chandler, Raymond
- “The Bronze Door”
Charnas, Suzee McKee
- “The Ancient Mind at Work”
Chesterton, G. K.
- The Man Who Was Thursday
Clement, Hal
Counselman, Mary Elizabeth
- “Night Court”
Davidson, Avram
- “Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight”
Davis, Dorothy Salisbury
- “The Muted Horn”
De Bodard, Aliette
- “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”
De Camp, L. Sprague
- “A Gun for Dinosaur”
- Lest Darkness Fall
DeFord, Miriam Allen
- “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’”
Del Rey, Lester
- “Pursuit”
Delany, Samuel R.
- “The Star-Pit”
Dick, Philip K.
Disch, Thomas M.
Doctorow, Cory
- “Craphound”
Drake, David
- “The Automatic Rifleman”
- “Time Safari”
Egan, Greg
- “Oceanic”
- “Singleton”
Ellison, Harlan
- “Grail”
- “The Human Operators” [with A. E. van Vogt]
Emshwiller, Carol
- “Day at the Beach”
Etchison, Dennis
- “The Smell of Death”
Farmer, Philip José
- “Mother”
Flynn, Michael F.
- “House of Dreams”
Grant, Charles L.
- “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose”
Graves, Robert
- “The Shout”
Greene, Graham
- “The End of the Party”
Griffith, Ann Warren
- “Captive Audience”
Guin, Wyman
- “Beyond Bedlam”
Haldeman, Joe
- “To Fit the Crime”
Hamilton, Edmond
- “Day of Judgment”
- “The Star-Stealers”
Hand, Elizabeth
- “Last Summer at Mars Hill”
Harness, Charles L.
- “The Rose”
Heinlein, Robert
Henderson, Zenna
- “Something Bright”
- “Subcommittee”
Herbert, Frank
Hollis, H. H.
- “Eeeetz Ch”
Howard, Robert E.
Jackson, Shirley
- “The Omen”
Jacobs, Sylvia
- “The Pilot and the Bushman”
Jemisin, N. K.
- “Non-Zero Probabilities”
Jingfang, Hao
- “Folding Beijing”
Kanakia, Naomi
- “Everquest”
Kelly, James Patrick
- “Friend” [with John Kessel]
Kessel, John
- “Another Orphan”
- “Friend” [with James Patrick Kelly]
King, Stephen
- “Beachworld”
- “The Jaunt”
Kipling, Rudyard
- “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw”
Kirk, Russell
- “Balgrummo’s Hell”
Knight, Damon
- “The Earth Quarter”
Kornbluth, C. M.
Kress, Nancy
- “Dancing on Air”
- “Inertia”
Kritzer, Naomi
- “The Year Without Sunshine”
Kushner, Ellen
- “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death”
Kuttner, Henry
Larson, Rich
- “There Used to Be Olive Trees”
Laumer, Keith
- “The Body Builders”
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lee, Tanith
Leiber, Fritz
Leinster, Murray
- “Pipeline to Pluto”
- “Proxima Centauri”
Ligotti, Thomas
- “The Last Feast of Harlequin”
Liu, Ken
- “The Perfect Match”
London, Jack
- “The Shadow and the Flash”
Long, Frank Belknap
- “The Hounds of Tindalos”
Lovecraft, H. P.
- “The Dreams in the Witch-House”
MacDonald, John D.
- Wine of the Dreamers
MacLean, Katherine
- “Pictures Don’t Lie”
- “The Snowball Effect”
Martin, George R. R.
Matheson, Richard
- “Little Girl Lost”
- “Steel”
McCammon, Robert
- “Yellowjacket Summer”
McHugh, Maureen F.
- “The Naturalist”
McKenna, Richard
- “They Are Not Robbed”
Merril, Judith
- “Project Nursemaid”
Miller, Walter M.
Mills, Samantha
- “Rabbit Test”
Moorcock, Michael
- “The Dreaming City”
Moore, C. L.
Niven, Larry
Norton, Andre
- “Mousetrap”
Nourse, Alan E.
- “Prime Difference”
Oates, Joyce Carol
- “In Shock”
Oliver, Chad
- “Let Me Live in a House”
Pangborn, Edgar
- “Angel’s Egg”
- “Longtooth”
Phillips, Peter
- “Lost Memory”
Pinsker, Sarah
- “And Then There Were (N-One)”
Pohl, Frederik
- “The Census Takers”
- “Nightmare with Zeppelins” [with C. M. Kornbluth]
Pournelle, Jerry
Quick, Dorothy
- “Strange Orchids”
Quinn, Seabury
- “Roads”
Rambo, Cat
- “Crazy Beautiful”
Raphael, Rick
- “Code Three”
Reed, Kit
- “Cynosure”
Resnick, Mike
- “Travels with My Cats”
Rice, Jane
- “The Idol of the Flies”
Roanhorse, Rebecca
- “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”
Robinson, Frank M.
- “The Oceans Are Wide”
Robinson, Kim Stanley
- “Green Mars”
Rusch, Kristine Kathryn
- “Recovering Apollo 8”
Russ, Joanna
Shea, Michael
- “Polyphemus”
Sheckley, Robert
Shepard, Lucius
- “The Jaguar Hunter”
Silverberg, Robert
Simak, Clifford D.
Smith, April
- “Birthright”
Smith, Clark Ashton
Smith, Cordwainer
- “Drunkboat”
- “Think Blue, Count Two”
Smith, E. E.
- Triplanetary (Part 1/4)
Smith, Evelyn E.
- “The Agony of the Leaves”
- “The Princess and the Physicist”
St. Clair, Margaret
Sterling, Bruce
- “Green Days in Brunei”
Stevens, Francis
- Sunfire (Part 1/2)
- Sunfire (Part 2/2)
Sturgatsky, Arkady
- “Initiative” [with Boris Strugatsky]
Strugatsky, Boris
- “Initiative” [with Arkady Strugatsky]
Sturgeon, Theodore
Swanwick, Michael
- “The Blind Minotaur”
Swirsky, Rachel
- “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window”
Tenn, William
- “Medusa Was a Lady!”
Tiptree, James
- “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket”
Triantafyllou, Eugenia
- “Loneliness Universe”
Tuttle, Lisa
- “The Horse Lord”
- “The Storms of Windhaven” [with George R. R. Martin]
Utley, Steven
- “The Glowing Cloud”
Van Vogt, A. E.
Vance, Jack
Varley, John
- “Retrograde Summer”
Vinge, Joan D.
- “The Storm King”
Vinge, Vernor
- “Apartness”
- “Original Sin”
Vonnegut, Kurt
- “The Big Trip Up Yonder”
Wagner, Karl Edward
- “In the Pines”
- “Two Suns Setting”
Wellman, Manly Wade
- “The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign”
- “The Valley Was Still”
Wells, H. G.
White, James
Wilhelm, Kate
- “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”
Williams, Walter Jon
- “Surfacing”
Williamson, Jack
Willis, Connie
- “All Seated on the Ground”
Wolfe, Bernard
- “Self Portrait”
Wolfe, Gene
- “Memorare”
Wong, Alyssa
- “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers”
Worrell, Everil
- “The Canal”
Wu, William F.
- “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium”
Yu, E. Lily
- “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight”
Zahn, Timothy
- “Cascade Point”
Zelazny, Roger
- Doorways in the Sand (Part 1/3)
- “The Keys to December”
Short Story Review: “There Shall Be No Darkness” by James Blish

October 31st, 2022

(Cover artist uncredited. Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950.)

Who Goes There?

James Blish is one of the defining practitioners of ’50s SF, although his legacy is sort of a mixed bag and he has not retained nearly the level of popularity of, say, Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. Like Asimov, Blish spent his formative years as part of the Futurians, a left-leaning New York-based fan group (although Blish’s politics were much murkier). Thus, Blish hung out with the likes of Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, Donald Wollheim, and C. M. Kornbluth. The Futurians would have an incalculably large impact on the history of the field, and like Kornbluth and others, Blish got his professional start in the early ’40s writing for Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. Also like Kornbluth, Blish would go on hiatus during America’s involvement in World War II, and would not return until the tail end of the ’40s, by this point having metamorphized into his “mature” phase.

1950 was an especially important year for Blish, as he started his epic Cities in Flight series with the novelette “Okie,” in the April 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That same month (although technically it would’ve been a month prior) we got “There Shall Be No Darkness,” one of the most notable SF-horror efforts of its era. The story was considered major enough (or at least fit enough for adaptation, and I would agree on that) to be made into a film, titled The Beast Must Die. But whereas as the source material is more concerned with rationalizing lycanthropy in scientific terms (it is, as I’ll explain, totally SF and not fantasy), the film looks to be more of a straight murder mystery. The Beast Must Die remains the only film adaptation of Blish’s work, which is a big shame because something like “A Work of Art” or “Surface Tension” could work great as a short film—maybe in the next season of Love, Death & Robots?

Little bit of trivia: Blish’s A Case of Conscience is so far (assuming they bring back the Retro Hugos) the only story to have won the Hugo twice, as the novel version won the Best Novel Hugo in 1959 while the novella version (which from what I’ve heard is the first third of the novel) won the Retro Hugo for Best Novella. This is also if we’re not counting Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which won both a special series Hugo and a couple Retro Hugos.

Placing Coordinates

First appeared in the April 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, which is on the Archive. Was later reprinted in the January 1969 issue of Magazine of Horror, also on the Archive. Unless you have a real phobia of two-columned writing (in which case you should not be reading old-fashioned SFF magazines like yours truly), it’s pretty easy to find online. Ah, but those book reprints! Because “There Shall Be No Darkness” is a somewhat famous story we have some options here. Firstly there’s A Treasury of Modern Fantasy by Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg; as I said in my review of C. L. Moore’s “Daemon,” this and Masters of Fantasy are the same anthology. There’s also The Fantasy Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, which seems to have a pretty loose conception of “fantasy” but whose contents are nonetheless of exceptional quality.

For single-author collections we have some good ones. If you’re a collector then I would suggest The Best of James Blish, as part of the Ballantine/Del Rey Best Of series from the ’70s and ’80s; these babies are old but gold, and their covers all range from good to excellent, making them fine collectors’ items. More recent, and even being in print, is Works of Art, which strives to be a more comprehensive collection of Blish’s short fiction. It’s a fancy hardcover from NESFA Press and it’s reasonably affordable (if you consider $30 to be reasonable). This is definitely one of that more reprinted stories I’ve reviewed thus far.

Enhancing Image

We start at a house party, the people therein being functionally the entire cast; there are something like eight or nine people at the party, but only six of them are plot-crucial, so I’ll focus on those. We’ve got Paul Foote, Jan Jarmoskowski, Doris Gilmore, Chris Lundgren, and Tom and Caroline Newcliffe, the host and hostess respectively. Tom and Caroline are filthy rich, and it’s not a coincidence that all the guests have to do with the arts and sciences—Painter being a painter, Jan and Doris being pianists (Doris actually being a former student of Jan’s, though they’re only seven years apart in age), and Chris being a psychiatrist as well as the story’s resident Mr. Exposition. Paul is the protagonist by virtue of the fact that he’s the POV character for most of it (I say most, put a pin in that one), since he’s not much of a hero; he’s more or less an ordinary guy who thinks, right from the beginning, that there’s something suspicious going on at the party.

There was another person in the room but Foote could not tell who it was. When he turned his unfocused eyes to count, his mind went back on him and he never managed to reach a total. But somehow there was the impression of another presence that had not been of the party before.

Jarmoskowski was not the presence. He had been there before. But he had something to do with it. There was an eighth presence now and it had something to do with Jarmoskowski.

What was it?

What is off about Jan, exactly? For one, his index and middle fingers are the same length, which admittedly is a little weird. Paul also notes that throughout dinner, Jan keeps stratching the palms of his hands (which also look unusually hairy), and, perhaps most telling, his canines are more pronounced than one would expect. If you’re in a werewolf story and you’re aware that you’re in a werewolf story, these all sound like very obvious signs that the person is a werewolf, but Paul is working off a hunch here—a hunch he acts on when he thinks the time is right. Unfortunately for Paul, he does something you’re very much not supposed to do in a horror story: confront the person who is probably (i.e., almost certainly) the killer by himself. I’m not sure what compelled Paul to do all this in the first place, as it’s not implied that he believed in werewolves before all this, though we soon find out that a certain other character knows a lot more than he lets on.

When Paul interrogates Jan, silver knife in hand (it has to be silver), we get what is very much not a twist but which feels like it could be one in another writer’s hands, which is Jan’s transformation. From what I’ve heard, The Beast Must Die tries really hard to save the werewolf reveal until the third act, but in “There Shall Be No Darkness,” there is no such stalling; we get a confirmation of Jan’s lycanthropy less than a third into the story, and frankly, it was telegraphed pretty strongly in advance. If you’re looking for a straight murder mystery, you’ll be let down, but Blish is clearly going for something else here. This is not, contrary to my initial expectations, a rehash of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” The reveal of Jan as the werewolf is not what the story is about; rather, the reveal of the werewolf serves as only the beginning of what makes this story so interesting: its science-fictional rationalization for lycanthropy.

Normally we would waist a lot of time with Paul trying to convince the other guests that there’s a werewolf on the property, but not so! Doris happened to catch a glimpse of Jan in his wolf form, mistaking him at first for one of the mansion’s dogs, though Jan is a big black wolf with red eyes. It’s a cool design, and it’s no surprise that Virgil Finlay would use it as inspiration for his badass interior art—ya know, the thing that convinced me to pick up this story in the first place. Finlay sure can get it.

Now, about how lycanthropy works in this story, because while it is inventive, and Blish’s attempt is an ambitious one, he can’t make it work 100%. Firstly, lycanthropy is treated basically like a physical illness with psychological ramifications, like a combination of tuberculosis and epilepsy. Like with TB back in ye olden times, someone with lycanthropy is rendered an outcast, even if the people casting them out can’t quite articulate what’s wrong with them. There is a truckload of technobabble Blish employs to make it sound like it makes sense, but basically a lycanthrope is able to manipulate organic matter to such an extent that they’re able to morph into animals whose skeletal structures are similar enough—at will! Hence, a lycanthrope can change into a wolf. This even extends to their clothes, assuming the clothes are made of organic material like cotton or what have you.

A lot of questions are raised with regards to how lycanthropy works here, and while Blish doesn’t answer all these questions, the mechanics behind lycanthropy are surprisingly not the most far-fetched thing in this story. But we’ll get to that in the spoilers section. Point being, werewolves are a bit different in “There Shall Be No Darkness,” but there are consistencies that will strike horror veterans as familiar; for one, Paul was right to confront Jan with a silver weapon, as lycanthropes are in fact weak to silver. They’re also weak to wolfsbane (called wolfbane in-story) and related plants, which was actually what made Jan scratch himself and act irritable—he was having an allergic reaction to the plants around the mansion.

We get all this information from Chris Lundgren, who, on top of being an apparently highly respected psychiatrist, is also experienced in dealing with lycanthropes. It’s not surprising, then, that he’s the first to believe Paul’s claim that Jan is a werewolf; what is surprising is that despite having known Jan for some time, Chris remained unaware of his lycanthropy while Paul, the average dude, had his suspicions. Regardless, without Chris the story would be standard horror as opposed to horror-tinged sicnec eifction, which is certainly unique; rarely is a story’s genre dependant on a single character. None of these characters is written with too much depth, and like I said, Chris is Mr. Exposition, but it says something of Blish’s vision and storytelling prowess that things remain very much engaging.

The question then becomes one of how to deal with Jan. Silver would work great, but the only silver Our Heroes™ have that could be used for weaponry is knives and candlesticks. They try melting some of the silver to make homegrown bullets, since the Newcliffes are hunters and have some guns to go around, but these prove to be woefully inaccurate, never mind possibly dangerous to the shooter. Ambushing Jan would be incredibly unlikely, due to his agility, so a hand-to-paw fight would probably not end well. Not helping matters is a snow storm which eventually turns into a blizzard, essentially trapping everyone on the property while Jan is on the prowl. “Why doesn’t he just go off somewhere and never be seen again?” Well, the explanation is a weird one: basically, Jan specifically has Doris in mind for his next victim, or at the very least is drawn to her, since during the first stretch of the story he imagined a pentagram on her hand which marked her. The obsession with the pentagram apparently last seven days, which is why Jan doesn’t escape right away.

Blish is very fond of putting science and religion in the boxing ring and seeing who wins, and while it certainly doesn’t go as in-depth as A Case of Conscience, there’s a bit of science-versus-religion with “There Shall Be No Darkness.” It’s all but said that Jan is a Christian, and a particularly superstitious one at that. According to Chris the vision of the pentagram is a hallucination lycanthropes have might compell them to unleash beastly violence (hence my earlier comparison to epilepsy, what with afflicted people having visions because of their seizures), but Jan probably believes the pentagram carries real metaphysical weight. Indeed, the larger effort to understand a mythical creature like the werewolf in scientific terms seems to be Blish trying to reconcile science with supernatural forces.

There Be Spoilers Here

What to do about the silver bullet problem? You’ll never guess. I said before that the Newcliffes are a rich couple, but what happens strains suspension of disbelief so hard that it actually put ths werewolf technobabble in perspective. Tom Newcliffe orders a shipment of guns and silver bullets to be FLOWN IN OVERNIGHT, DURING A SNOW STORM. This would be hard enough to take if the story was set in modern times and Tom had an Amazon Prime account, never mind the cartoon shit that we get here. Perhaps more than anything else, this passage tells me that Blish could’ve had a masterpiece on his hands if he had so much as gone through one more rewrite; alas, this was the ’50s (or more accurately the late ’40s) and people writing for the pulps were not inclined to revise too much.

I wanna take this moment to talk about where and when “There Shall Be No Darkness” was published, because I think it explains the story’s unique but unrefined nature. Thrilling Wonder Stories was, along with its sister magazine Startling Stories, a second-rate SFF magazine in an era when Astounding was king; there was no question that Campbell’s magazine paid the most and had the most prestigious image. Which is not to say there weren’t alternatives! Albeit not many, especially for a horror tale like Blish’s. Weird Tales was still going, and you could argue “There Shall Be No Darkness” is what could’ve been called a “weird-scientific” tale, but it’s totally possible that Weird Tales paid an even lower rate at this point than Thrilling Wonder Stories. I wouldn’t know off the top of my head. It almost certainly would not have appealed to Campbell, whose tastes were starting to narrow, and who very soon would unleash a cataclysm upon the field: Dianetics.

Maybe it was for the best that Blish’s story ended up where it did.

A lot happens in “There Shall Be No Darkness,” much of it best experienced without having the whole thing spelled out, so I won’t delve too much here. It’s a long and complex story; ISFDB erroneously cites it as a novella, when really it comes out to about thirty book pages, but that mistake says something about its density. I’ll zero in on the climax, which I think actually leans closer to tragedy than horror. Following the deaths of a couple characters, and with Jan nowhere to be seen, Paul contemplates what might happen if Jan were to escape off the property and spread the disease of lycanthropy far and wide (lycanthropy being an infectious disease, not unlike our modern conception of zombies). We arrive at perhaps the most Blish-esque passage, which seems to forecast one of Blish’s chief concerns during his mature phase: mankind’s metaphysical place in the universe.

Maybe God is on the side of the werewolves.

The blasphemy of an exhausted mind. Yet he could not put it from him. Suppose Jarmoskowski should conquer his compulsion and lie out of sight until the seven days were over. Then he could disappear. It was a big country. It would not be necessary for him to kill all his victims—just those he actually needed for food. But he could nip a good many. Every other one, say.

And from wherever he lived the circle of lycanthropy would grow and widen and engulf—

Maybe God had decided that proper humans had made a mess of running the world, had decided to give the nosferatu, the undead, a chance at it. Perhaps the human race was on the threshold of that darkness into which he had looked throughout last night.

But Jan comes back—to Doris. Perhaps he hasn’t killed her yet because he loves her, and she’s had a crush on him for years; if not for the current circumstances, they might be perfect for each other. Like something out of the book of Genesis, Jan tempts Doris by making her an offer, and a pretty simple one: he bites her, “infects” her with his disease, and they run off together, two lycanthropes who will have nothing except each other. Despite what Paul suspects, lycanthropy is a genetic dead end; it can only be spread via infection, and lycanthropes, no matter where they go, will be treated as pariahs. Could two lycanthropes also breed in order to continue this pseudo-species? Probably. Blish isn’t very clear on that, but then, oddly less so than the earlier Jack Williamson novella “Darker Than You Think,” “There Shall Be No Darkness” is not really concerned with sex. Regardless, lycanthropy sounds like a fine recipe for succumbing to madness, then death.

Paul, who we’re told has a habit of eavesdropping, uses his habit for good this time when he stops by Doris’s room and catches the two talking, and… well, you can get what happens next. Not that Jan seems to mind dying too much; for him it would either be that or living an impossible dream with Doris. Think living day after day as a werewolf would be cool? Think again! Of course, it seems like in werwolf media a person’s life expectancy whittles down to a fraction of what it would normally be if they become a werewolf; if authorities or werwolf hunters don’t get them then their own inevitable self-loathing will. Damn near every werewolf narrative I can think of is ultimately a tragic one, in the sense that we get a grim end that comes about because of a combination of circumstances and the main character’s flaws. In the context of the story, lycanthropy may as well be a terminal illness, and Jan no longer wants to be treated—he just wants it to end.

A Step Farther Out

I would highly recommend “There Shall Be No Darkness,” even though I think it’s obviously flawed in parts. A problem I’ve often encountered with Blish (except for “A Work of Art,” which I think is a masterpiece) is that his prose does not quite match up with the breadth of his ideas. You could make that criticism with a lot of old-timey SFF authors, especially guys like Philip K. Dick and A. E. van Vogt whose raw prose does not do justice to what they’re writing about, but Blish was heavily inspired by the modernists of all people! He was a big fan of James Joyce! He thought Joyce’s “The Dead” was the best short story ever written. Clearly he wanted to be like Joyce, or at least a D. H. Lawrence, but like most SFF writers (especially from that period), Blish was not a poet; he did not have a delicate ear for the English language. I say all this because “There Shall Be No Darkness” is a very good story that feels like it could’ve been a truly great story, and in that it feels both deeply satisfying and disappointing at the same time.

Well, that’s spooky month for you. Despite the fact that I’ve covered three vampire stories this month, I have to admit I’m more fond of werewolves; it’s just a shame that there don’t seem to be as many werewolf stories as vampire stories. I can think of several reprint anthologies wholly dedicated to vampire stories, but werewolves don’t get that much love. If you’re looking for some vintage but inventive werewolf action, then today’s story will almost certainly do the trick. I’m quite fond of it.

See you next time.