Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Serial Review: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (Part 1/3)

August 6th, 2022

(Cover by Don Sibley. Galaxy, January 1952.)

Who Goes There?

My history with Alfred Bester is a bit complex. By all rights he should be one of my favorite SFF authors of the ’50s, given how strong his output from that period is. Bester started in the field in the late ’30s, and even submitted a few notable short works to John W. Campbell for Astounding and Unknown. Like a lot of authors during World War II, though, Bester would take a break from writing once the US joined the war effort—a break that lasted nearly a decade. From 1943 to 1949 we got jack shit from Bester, but once he returned in 1950, he quickly established himself as one of the leading voices of a new generation of authors, being more sophisticated, more experimental, and more cosmopolitan than what came before. He was perfect for Galaxy Science Fiction, H. L. Gold’s new magazine, which had claimed its throne with a speed and force unseen before or since in the field as the best SF magazine on the market.

While Bester’s short fiction, at its best, may stand as his top-to-bottom strongest work, he has become more known nowadays for his first two novels, both of them initially published in Galaxy. The Demolished Man, serialized from January to Marsh 1952, would later win the first ever Hugo for Best Novel, and no doubt contributed to Galaxy tying with Astounding for the Best Professional Magazine Hugo that year.

Placing Coordinates

The January 1952 issue of Galaxy is freely available on the Archive. Since this is a serial you can guess where you’d be able to find it. If you’re curious about reading the book version, though (which I hear is a fair bit different from the magazine version), it’s very much in print from iBooks. You can also find the SF Masterworks paperback for The Demolished Man at a pretty good price. This is a somewhat famous novel, so you won’t have too hard a time finding it.

Enhancing Image

We start with a lengthy prologue section where we meet with a series of characters in rapid succession—none of whom, at least directly, play a big part in the story. For instance we’re told about the invention of anti-gravity, called Nulgee, by a scientist named Edward Turnbul, a man who would be sort of credited with the invention but, as we’re told, screwed out of the patent for it.

It doesn’t matter. As the narrator tells us:

Forget Turnbul. He is not your protagonist. If you identify with him, you will be lost in this story, as Turnbul is lost in the shifting pattern that produced the Demolished Man.

We’re told about quite a few other things, both about the background of this world and about the circumstances leading to the Demolished Man. Who’s the Demolished Man? Stay tuned. We get the invention of anti-gravity, exploration of other planets in the solar system, the invention of an advanced sensory-intensive form of entertainment called a Panty (that’s right, these things are called Pantys), the bubbling of a generations-long business rivalry between two families, Reich and D’Courtney.

Most importantly for understanding the world of The Demolished Man, we’re introduced to the emerging existence of telepaths, called Espers in this novel. Much like the telepaths of A. E. van Vogt’s novel Slan, the Espers are a genetic anomaly, making up a small portion of the human population and sustained by mating within the group; unlike van Vogt’s slans, who are viciously persecuted by normal humans, the Espers are highly sought after in human society. Indeed, telepathy plays at least as much a role in how this society functions as space flight—probably more so.

Part of me wonders if Bester wrote this novel in response to van Vogt’s; it has a few of the same ingredients, but in most other ways it reads like a foil to that earlier novel. The slans, and especially their relationship with normal human society, very much read like a precursor to X-Men, whereas Bester’s novel shows what the world might look like if such mutants were still a minority, but highly respected, allowed to be themselves out in the open without fear of persecution.

Speaking of out in the open, Bester more or less gives the whole game away in this opening section, thus making the magazine version of The Demolished Man rather hard to spoil. I say the magazine version because even a cursory glance at the book version reveals that pretty much the entirety of the opening section had been thrown in the trash between versions. Usually there are revisions between a novel’s serialization and its book publication, but usually this means the author added material between versions, rather than deleted. I have to assume this is because, as entertaining as the prologue is in parts, it also frontloads the text with exposition—so much exposition you feel like your head’s about to burst, and some of it is irrelevant anyway.

I also have to assume the change was made because the prologue makes the rest of the events too easy to predict, to the point where we get to do little guessing ourselves. Even before we’re given our protagonist’s name, we’re basically told that he’s doomed.

We’re given the murder weapon, an item used to set up the murder, and presumably the murderer himself, the Demolished Man. At the end of this protracted sequence we’re introduced to Ben Reich, said protagonist and the latest in the Reich family line of pirates and scoundrels, himself the head of Sacrament, a firm which rivals the D’Courtney Cartel. Reich is not a good guy; in fact he’s going to commit a murder by the end of the first part. How do we figure this?

For Ben Reich is The Demolished Man.

What does it mean to be Demolished? Stay tuned. But once we get past the prologue, the plot hits the ground running, and it’s a deceptively simple plot, though Bester plays quite a few tricks on us to make us think otherwise. The short of it is that Reich finds his business in a bind, Sacrament being smeared aggressively by the D’Courtney Cartel in the public eye, and Reich finds he must either enter a merging agreement with his rival or stop the D’Courtney Cartel by any means necessary.

An exchange with Craye D’Courtney, the head of the Cartel, goes nowhere. Reich is a desperate man. Even before he contemplates murder he seeks help regarding night terrors he’s been having, about what he calls “the Man With No Face,” an apparition which haunts him, and whose meaning Espers in Rich’s company know about but are unwilling to tell the man himself. Okay, if you’re an even slightly astute reader then you can guess what the Man With No Face represents, but that’s part of the fun for me. Everyone seems at least somewhat aware of what’s about to happen except for Reich, who, as we’re about to find out, is not as savvy as he thinks he is.

Since Sacrament is on the brink of collapse and since D’Courtney apparently refuses to back down or meet Reich halfway, you know what that means: the prick must die. Given the premise you might think we’re about to get an episode of Columbo, a sort of reverse whodunnit—and we sort of do, but there’s an important twist which complicates things.

How do you get away with murder in a society where, due to the nigh-omnipotence of telepaths, getting away with such a crime is virtually impossible?

This is made even trickier by the fact that there is not just one type of telepath; nay, there are three. Early on, in a scene that seems humorously aware of how redundant (to the characters) the exposition it’s dishing out is, Sacrament’s chief of personnel reminds Reich of how Espers are ranked.

“The Esper 3 can peep the conscious level of a mind. The 3rd can discover what a subject is thinking at the moment of thought. The 3rd is the lowest class of telepaths.”

As for the second rank of Espers:

“They are experts like myself who can penetrate beneath the conscious level of the mind to the preconscious. Most 2nds are in the professional class… physicians, lawyers, engineers, educators, economists, architects and so on.”

And finally the top-ranking Espers:

“The 1sts are capable of deep peeping, through the conscious and preconscious layers down to the unconscious, the lowest levels of the mind. Primordial basic desires and so forth. These Espers, of course, hold premium positions.”

Now I know what you’re thinking: “This is a bunch of Freudian nonsense.” I mean, it is. What the hell does “preconscious” even mean? Maybe only a 1st or 2nd Esper could tell me that. Despite the fact that it takes place a few centuries into the future, the world of The Demolished Man is very much steeped in slang and cultural expectations that would’ve been prevalent in the early ’50s, including people’s fixation on Freud and mommy complexes and all that. How much fun you have with this story will partly depend on how much leeway you’re willing to give the pseudoscience.

What holds up much better is the way in which Bester tries to convey to us what living as a telepath might look like, including Espers usually thinking to each other instead of talking out loud, and also what several conversations between Epsers happening at the same time might look like. Spoilers: it looks like word salad, or like something out of House of Leaves. The experimental typography must’ve blown people’s minds in 1952, not to mention the references to pornography, prostitution, and the general nastiness of the characters. Even today, the scene where a bunch of Espers are thinking to each other at a cocktail party comes off as experimental, and it’s a trick Bester would pull again (with arguably even greater success) in his next novel, The Stars My Destination.

What makes The Demolished Man different from other SF novels of the period is not in its narrative complexity (which isn’t all that complex), or its depth of characterization (which is often flamboyant but not terribly deep), but rather how fucking lurid and hardboiled it is. While the prominence of telepathy and ESP in general would have appealed to Campbell, the luridness and typographical experiments would never have been allowed in the pages of Astounding, and which conversely help demonstrate why Galaxy was such a big deal at the time.

You probably have a general outline in your head as to what happens in Part 1, and you’d probably be right, but even so, the murder is in the details. How exactly does Reich plan to carry out his killing, and how does he plan on getting away with it?

There Be Spoilers Here

Ironically, in order to get away with murder in a society where a whole class of people can read (or “peep,” they call it) the deepest desires of everyone else, Reich will need the help of one of these telepaths. It’s not easy. An Esper who acts as an accomplice to a crime risks getting thrown out of the Guild, and what the Guild says is law for Espers. Thankfully, nobody’s perfect, and theoretically anyone can be… persuaded to do certain things. And an Esper who has no choice but to help Reich can be very useful.

Reich has something stashed away, ready to be called upon for situations such as this. He goes home and cracks open his safe, taking out a notebook and an envelope; the envelope reads, in all caps, “TO BE OPENED IN CASE OF MURDER.” As for the notebook, it might just have an answer as to what Esper he could catch in his spider web.

Reich flipped through the pages of the notebook… ABDUCTION… ABORTION… ANARCHISTS… ARSONISTS… BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION (ALREADY)… BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION (POSSIBLE)… Under POSSIBLE, he found the names of fifty-seven prominent people. One of them was Augustus T8, Esper Medical Doctor 1. He nodded with satisfaction.

Certain Espers have numbers and symbols as part of their names. God knows why. Gus T8, Duffy Wyg&, Sam @kins, etc. Feels like a proto-cyberpunk touch, but then The Demolished Man kind of anticipates cyberpunk by a good thirty years already. The film noir narrative, the oppressive urban setting, the prevalence of technology, it’s got a dash of what William Gibson and Pat Cadigan would do later.

So Reich has his man; convincing, or rather blackmailing T8 will come later. Normally I would complain about characters being entirely good or entirely evil, but I do think there’s a talent to writing a deliciously despicable villain, which Reich is an example of. It’s not every day you have the villain also be the protagonist, especially in a ’50s SF story. Anyway, he opens the envelope, then, and we get (for me, anyway) one of the most memorable passages in Part 1, written by one of Reich’s ancestors.

To those who come after me:

The test of intellect is the refusal to belabor the obvious. If you have opened this letter, we already understand each other. I have prepared four general murder plans which may help you. I bequeath them to you as part of the Reich inheritance. They are only outlines. The details must be filled in by yourself as your time and necessity require.

But remember this: The essence of murder never changes. It is always the conflict of the killer against society with the victim as the prize. And the ABC of conflict with society never changes. Be audacious, be brave, be confident and you will not fail. Against these qualities society has no defense.

Signed Geoffrey Reich. Villainy runs in the family.

Much of Part 1 is set-up, with Reich recruiting T8, buying the murder weapon (or rather bullying for it) from Jerry Church, an expelled Esper who had previously worked for Reich and paid the price for it. Reich also buys a very old beat-up copy of a party book titled Let’s Play Party, which will be important for the climax of Part 1.

Indeed, the climax of Part 1, the (mostly human-attended) cocktail party where Reich seeks out D’Courtney with T8’s help, is also the best sequence thus far. It’s genuinely tense, as the big house where the party’s happening goes black as part of a game of Sardines and Reich has to find his way to where D’Courtney is hiding. I will say, however, that there is a passage during this sequence that struck me as one of those rare instances where Bester shits the bed in the prose department.

See, the hostess of the climactic party, Maria Beaumont, is a real upper class New York type; this whole novel radiates that energy, but Beaumont is perhaps the character most telling of when and where this novel would’ve been written. A slight recurring element with The Demolished Man so far is that Bester is simply not as good at characterizing his women as the men, writing them as bitchy, incredibly vain, and weirdly slutty for material that would’ve been published in a relatively classic pulp zine. I’m not sure if that last part is progressive or regressive, given the context. Normally female characters written at this time would have barely any agency, more focused on being wives than autonomous people, but Bester’s women are unavashedly thirsty for some action.

Take this decription of Beaumont, though, you’ll see what I mean.

Maria Beaumont clove through the waters, arms outstretched, eyes outstretched, bosom outstretched… her body transformed by pneumatic surgery into an exaggerated East Indian figure with puffed hips, puffed calves and puffed gilt breasts.

What do you mean by this, Alfred?

Still, that awkward description is counterbalanced by when Reich finds D’Courtney, being invisible both physically because of the darkness and mentally because he’s blocking possible Esper intrusion with a jingle he keeps repeating. (As an aside, using pop songs and commercial jingles to block out conscious thoughts Espers’ peeping is clever.)

We had heard, in a previous scene, that D’Courtney is sick—possibly dying, which raises the question of why Reich doesn’t just wait for the old man to kick the bucket. We also know by now, though, that Reich is not what you’d call a reasonable man. Still, the scene where Reich finds D’Courtney is shocking, deeply evocative in its imagery, and even reminiscent of the moment in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where Marlow meets the decrepit Kurtz.

Reich found himself in a spherical room that was the heart of a giant orchid. The walls were curling orchid petals, the pillars were stamens, the floor was a golden calyx; the chairs, tables and couches were orchid and gold. But the room was old… old… the petals faded and peeling, the golden tile floor ancient and the tessellations splitting. There was an old, old man stretched on the couch, musty and wilted, like a dried weed… like the dessication of a venomous mandrake root.

No, not even the misspelling of “desiccation” can ruin the moment. It’d be fair to say the novel has been “heightened” up to this point, but D’Courtney’s room being described as like a dying flower in conjunction with the man’s physical sickness comes as positively dreamlike—yet not necessarily running in contrast with everything else, which is knee-deep in Freudian lingo and symbolism. (As another aside, I was brutally reminded of how fucking awful the copy-editing for ’50s-era Galaxy was. That this magazine was hyped to hell and back despite having enough typos and misprints to make self-published authors blush is telling of the actual content’s quality.)

Despite D’Courtney’s protests, feebleness, and apparent denial of rejecting Reich’s request for a deal, the deed is done. For a split second it looks like Reich is about to execute his plan perfectly, only that there is one major problem: someone saw the killing.

A Step Farther Out

I do have to wonder why Bester trips over his own dick with Freudian psychology here; he didn’t exactly strike me as a Freudian type in his other stories. In fact, when Bester spoke once with Campbell and realized how fucking looney the latter was with his thoughts on ESP and Dianetics, he stopped contributing to Astounding. Not to say pseudoscience can’t be used in a compelling way for the sake of a story, as ESP plays a major part in The Demolished Man and largely informs its idiosyncrasies for the better, but the emphasis on Freud strikes me as both conspicuous and of-its-time.

I don’t want to say this novel is “dated,” because I think calling old SF dated is a worthless sentiment. Of course old SF is dated, this shit was written seventy years ago. Few things peeve me like readers dunking on classic works in the field because of their age, because let’s face it, everything is going show its age at some point. The real question is, how compelling is this thing in the current year? I would say it’s pretty good still. The pacing, once we get past the opening exposition dump, is lightning quick, and as is often true of novels from that time when paperback publishing hadn’t yet become in vogue for SF, it’s short; even if you don’t like it, you can’t be too mad about wasting your time on it.

Bester is an efficient writer, and while his economy combined with his artsy-fartsy sensibilities are demonstrated more succinctly with his short stories, he makes a good first impression at novel length with The Demolished Man. I feel like we’re just getting started with this, though; we haven’t even really met the not-Columbo who will inevitably bring Reich to justice. Because we know Reich has to fail, it’s just a question of how.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Bears Discover Fire” by Terry Bisson

August 3rd, 2022

(Cover by Wayne Barlowe. Asimov’s, August 1990.)

Who Goes There?

Despite having read this story multiple times over the years, my experience with Terry Bisson remains minimal, which is not to say he hasn’t written much. Bisson began his SFF career in earnest in the ’80s, and unlike most authors he started out as a novelist before dipping his toes in short fiction; he already had a few novels to his credit by the time “Bears Discover Fire” was published. You may also recognize him as the man who finished Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman on Walter M. Miller Jr.’s behalf, after the latter had committed suicide.

Bisson turned 80 this year.

“Bears Discover Fire” has to be one of the most decorated short stories in SFF history. Where do I even start? It won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story. It also placed #1 in the 1991 Asimov’s Short Story poll. Really the only major award this thing didn’t win was the World Fantasy, and I have to assume it was a close call.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1990 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which can found on the Archive here. If you want a slightly more “legitimate” method then know that it’s also been reprinted digitally in Lightspeed Magazine. Even if we’re to ignore those, “Bears Discover Fire” is one of the most reprinted SFF tales of the past few decades, and you won’t struggle to find it in some anthology, not least of these being Gardner Dozois’s The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction and Orson Scott Card’s Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century. You have no excuse is what I’m saying.

This is the kind of story that could’ve easily have been published in F&SF, and even half a decade earlier it probably would’ve been, but for better or worse, Dozois had a very loose definition of “science fiction.”

Enhancing Image

A man, his brother, and the brother’s son stop just off the highway when they catch a flat. Bobby, Wallace, and Wallace Jr. For the longest time I thought of the narrator as being nameless, but Wallace Jr. calls him “Uncle Bobby” at one point, so what do I know. Anyway, Bobby is really good with cars, and he gives Wallace Jr. a flashflight before replacing the flat tire. The flashlight keeps going dead (one of those things where you have to keep shaking the battery), but Bobby’s able to get the job done. There is just one problem, though: not all the light is coming from the flashlight.

Our characters find some local bears, which is strange in itself because apparently there are few bears in Kentucky, but what’s stranger is that these bears are carrying torches. Now, given the premise of bears becoming intelligent enough to use fire, this sounds like it may turn into a horror story—only it’s not. Something I’ve appreciated about this story with each reread is the dry humor which borders on the absurd. Take the ending of this opening scene for instance, which, rather than having a melodramatic moment of revelation about the bears, has this:

Opening three doors at once, we got into the car and drove off. Wallace was the first to speak. “Looks like bears have discovered fire,” he said.

So bears have discovered fire. Not just in Kentucky but in several other states, perhaps not coincidentally all Southern states—with the exception of Illinois, although Bobby notes it specifically happening in southern Illinois. Bears have begun making bonfires near the highways, but aside from that they’re not doing much that’s unusual for a bear, other than the fact that they’re not going into hibernation once winter approaches.

To this day I’ve not encountered many uniquely Southern works of SFF. A lot from the Northeastern region, of course, and a good deal from the Midwest, but things get more scarce once we get near the Southeast. But then how much regional SFF is there anyway. Regardless, “Bears Discover Fire” is definitely a Southern SFF story, complete with Wallace Jr. knowing how to use a gun despite being in his teens yet. I would also say this is pastoral, and I guess it is, except that this not a story that exactly yearns for pastoralism; maybe not a yearning, but a passing of the torch between old and new, or maybe rural and urban.

More important than Wallace (who basically disappears early on), we get Wallace and Bobby’s mother, who’s very old, to the point of being kept in a nursing home. An aside, but nursing homes may be the most depressing places humans have ever conceived. A day in prison will not break your spirit like a day in an old folks’ home. The mother is pretty funny. There’s a gentle cynicism that permeates the narrative, from the mother’s hungering for death to Wallace not only being a minister at what sounds like one of those made-up Protestant churches (“House of the Righteous Way, Reformed,” it’s called) but making most of his money through real estate.

Once again, the bears discovering fire sounds like it could lead to horrific consequences for the humans, but any damage we hear about is played for laughs. Consider this little episode, while Bobby and Wallace Jr. are at the nursing home and watching TV:

The TV interviewed a hunter and his wife whose $117,500 Shenandoah Valley home had burned. She blamed the bears. He didn’t blame the bears, but he was suing for compensation from the state since he had a valid hunting license. The state hunting commissioner came on and said that possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (enjoin, I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back. I thought that was a pretty liberal view for a state commissioner. Of course, he had a vested interest in not paying off.

Bobby’s a pretty chill guy about all of it.

What makes Bobby work so well as the narrator is that he’s not someone who’s trying to be funny. A problem often encountered with first-person narrators is either they try too hard to be funny/endearing, and end up as obnoxious, or they serve such a distanced perspective that a third-person narrator would have done just as well or better. But Bobby is an unassuming fellow, and he does have a stake in the matter; he becomes curious, in his own way, about the bears, and because Wallace is away with his wife on some business trip, he takes Wallace Jr. with him for the ride.

There Be Spoilers Here

You may be wondering something. “How did the bears get like this?” We get an implied explanation, but it’s not confirmed, which is just as well, and it does after all serve a symbolic purpose:

Another scientist said the bears were attracted by the berries on a new bush that grew only in the medians of the interstates. He claimed this berry was the first new species in recent history, brought about by the mixing of seeds along the highway. He ate one on TV, making a face, and called it a “newberry.”

The so-called newberries are, according to Bobby, so sweet as to be sour. A human could theoretically eat a newberry, but it has simply too strong a taste.

Unless you’re a bear.

The bears love the newberries. Does it have anything to do with their increased intelligence? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just something nice for them to eat that happens to grow near highways. Another token of the new, urbanized South, yet not necessarily a bad thing.

One day Bobby gets a call from the nursing home and thinks at first that his mother has finally passed away, but this turns out to not be the case. No, it turns out that his mother has escaped, taking her beloved tobacco and a bedspread with her. It doesn’t take long for Bobby to get an idea as to where his mother could have gone.

When Bobby and Wallace Jr. find the old woman, she’s sitting with a bunch of bears, at a bonfire of their making. At first Bobby and the kid are nervous with the bears, but find that they’re not aggressive; indeed there seems to be a bit of humanness about the bears now—how they sit around the fire and stare into it, passing around a hubcap filled with newberries. They’re like a bunch of people, some friends, some family, maybe a few strangers, camping around a fire on a cool night.

Maybe a new human race is emerging.

The climax of “Bears Discover Fire” is deeply bittersweet. I remember doing a live reading of it with a good friend of mine some months ago, and the ending made him tear up a bit. Just a little bit. Even on a fifth (or maybe tenth) reading, I still find the mother’s death while among the bears to be powerful in an unspeakable way. Bisson defies our expectations one last time by having the mother die in the most peaceful way possible, surrounded by her son and grandson, the bears simply minding their own business. There’s even a bit of humor during this final scene with Bobby and his mom that doesn’t intrude on the sadness.

I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased.

She dies holding his hand, and that’s that.

The morning comes, and Wallace shows up with a couple state troopers backing him. His overnight stay with the bears has changed Bobby in almost a metaphysical way, one of those classic SF moments where a door has been opened. Bobby describes the state troopers in dehumanizing terms, or rather he describes them as being no more human than the bears with how stoic and seemingly isolated they act.

At the very end Bobby tries eating a newberry again, but he can’t do it; it’s a thing meant for bears, not people.

A Step Farther Out

“Bears Discover Fire” is the kind of short story you can easily teach in an English lit class, outside the confines of genre. Is it science fiction? Is it fantasy? It’s been anthologized as belonging to either, but I personally think of it as a speculative fable. It’s short, about a dozen pages (Lightspeed weighs it in at only 4,701 words), and you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time much even if, God forbid, you end up not liking it. What helps, of course, is that Bisson’s hand is sure and light, a prose style that’s not poetic per se but which nonetheless is rich in detail, from Bobby’s observations to everyday life of modern Kentucky.

I like “Bears Discover Fire” a lot, big surprise; it’s been a favorite of mine for the past few years, and I always go back to it when re-reading anthologies (which, ultimately, I tend to only re-read certain stories from anyway). It seemed like a good first pick for this site, as it’s pretty well-known, pretty easy to find, and it’s classroom discussion fodder without being overbearing—what with all the obvious but not obnoxious symbolism. Picking up the issue of Asimov’s it originally appeared in and re-reading it thoroughly once more, I’m struck by its gentle beauty and its soft-spoken sense of humor. I don’t laugh out loud exactly, but I always chuckle, and I always feel like I’m being transported to west Kentucky in the late ’80s, despite being solidly a Jersey boy.

I’m also reminded of Clifford D. Simak, who we’ll get to pretty soon. But whereas Simak clearly prefers the rural Midwestern utopia he remembers (or thinks he remembers) from his childhood over modernity, Bisson’s viewpoint seems more nuanced—at least in the case of the one story of his I vividly remember reading. The bears, as a sign of modernity, are taken not as good or bad, but simply as new things in a new era. An era of around-the-clock news and advertising which has its ups and downs.

Well, in a few days we’ll be tackling the first part of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, and after that we have Simak’s Hugo-winning novella “The Big Front Yard.” Hopefully you’ll look up a scan, or a book reprint of your choice, and read along with me. I’ll see you then.

I miss you already.
Things Beyond: August 2022

August 1st, 2022
(Cover by Hubert Rogers. Astounding, February 1940.)

Picking stories to review can be pretty hard. Imagine simply reading fiction in your free time: novels, short stories, whatever. There are so many things you want to get to, things you’ve heard good things about, things you’ve been meaning to reread (because rereading is important), and yet there are only so many hours in the day.

Now I must, for August, limit myself to writing about three short stories, two novel serials, and two novellas. And not just anything; these will be the first to charge into battle, the first guinea pigs for me to test on and see what this site will be all about. The stories that will help me find my footing the most.

As such, all the stories this month will at least be Hugo nominees, if not winners—with one exception, and even then it’s by a two-time Hugo winner. Speaking of which, we have, for the serials:
1. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Published in three parts in Galaxy Science Fiction, January to March 1952, and it would win the very first Hugo for Best Novel. I’m fond of Bester’s short fiction, and The Stars My Destination is still a delightfully hardboiled and experimental novel. Alas, I’ve yet to read The Demolished Man, his debut novel, but that’ll change pretty soon.
2. If This Goes On— by Robert Heinlein, published in two parts in Astounding Science Fiction, February to March 1940. An early and defining work by one of my absolute favorite authors, though I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read it before. It would win the Retro Hugo for Best Novella. I know, it’s technically a novella, but hey, if it’s serialized, it gets a serialized review.
Now for the novellas. I must confess, dear reader, I have a huge soft spot for novellas, especially when it comes to SFF. Hell, SFF is the only field of literature nowadays where novellas still get written and published regularly. Still, two novellas for this month. I had to choose wisely. Here they are:
1. “The Big Front Yard” by Clifford D. Simak. Astounding Science Fiction, October 1958. Winner of the 1959 Hugo for Best Novelette (the Best Novella category didn’t exist yet). Aside from his Hugo-winning novel Way Station this is probably the quintessential Simak story, so we’ll be giving it a deep dive and see how Simak works his magic.
2. “The Lineman” by Walter M. Miller Jr. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1957. You may know Miller as the author of A Canticle for Leibowitz, but did you know that he also wrote… OTHER STUFF? He even won another Hugo with “The Darfstellar,” but I’m more interested in checking out this one.
Finally, we have the short stories for this month. Two of these are rereads (one I’ve reread more times than I can count), but as you know, rereading is important. And the one I haven’t read before has me very curious. This month’s short stories are:
1. “Bears Discover Fire” by Terry Bission. Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1990. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, God knows what else, and I’ve read it about as many times as it’s been reprinted—which is a lot. A fine choice for the inaugural short story.
2. “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” by Rebecca Roanhorse. Apex Magazine, August 2017. Hugo and Nebula winner. This will be my first time reading this short story, and by extension anything by Roanhorse. Very excited about it.
3. “With Morning Comes Mistfall” by George R. R. Martin. Analog Science Fiction, May 1973. Hugo and Nebula nominee. Martin is one of the most famous fantasy authors ever, but readers will be less familiar and thus pleasantly surprised with his SF.
I’ll be linking to the source magazine issues when available/convenient. I want my readers (all five of you) to be able to read these stories without going through much hassle, and besides, you get to discover or rediscover some stuff that’s really worth reading. I won’t always be able to provide a digital zine link—occasionally I’ll have to track down used print copies, like some kind of literary raccoon.

Won’t you read with me?
Why We’re Here

July 18th, 2022
(“A Long Way from Home” by Frank Kelly Freas. Omni, March 1980.)

Howdy, partner.

This is an SFF literature blog that’ll tackle science fiction, fantasy, and horror published in the magazines—print, digital, you name it. No books, only zines. We won’t be reviewing whole novels ~~except when I say so~~ at a time but novel serials. Partly this is because I more often love SFF writing in shorter bursts, and partly I’m acknowledging my limitations; I’m not that fast or thorough a reader. My eyesight is incredibly poor and I have a bad back, which may sound surprising given I’m not even thirty years old yet.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Why start a blog about fiction from SFF magazines, specifically? Why dedicate a blog to SFF magazines and not books? Surely more people read books: novels, anthologies, single-author collections, and so on. You’re certainly right, but I have my reasons.

Time to lay down some ground rules, which admittedly are subject to change. Here’s how it’ll all work:
1. On the first day of each month, I’ll post a short editorial about stories I’ll be reviewing for the rest of that month, called Things Beyond. I’ll alternate between short story and novella reviews starting on the 3rd and continuing weekly (so the 10th, 17th, etc.), while serials will be covered part by part starting on the 6th, and again continuing weekly. If I haven’t finished the last part of a serial on the 27th, I continue it on the 6th. If I’m set to review a novella on the 31st of the month, that novella gets replaced with a COMPLETE NOVEL, i.e., a story running 40,000 words or longer—with the necessary educated guesses.
2. Each review will be an in-depth look at the given story, regardless of the story’s length. I’ll try to get all I can out of each experience, for the sake of improving my reading comprehension skills (which are not great, honestly), and giving these stories the time I think they deserve. Writing fiction, even trash (and we will sometimes be reading trash), takes a lot of time and effort. You won’t get a post from me saying, “Yeah I thought this short story was just fine, okay bye bye now.”
3. If a story has never been published in a magazine, it’s not eligible for this blog, sorrrrrrry. Preferably I want to cover magazine originals, but if a story was originally published in book form (or in a magazine that doesn’t seem to be available digitally anywhere) and then reprinted in an available genre magazine at any point, that’s eligible as well. Novels that have never seen print in the zines are, naturally, excluded.
4. What is a magazine, anyway? Basically we’re talking about periodicals that go issue by issue, be it professional, semi-pro, or even fanzines that happen to publish fiction. Print and online magazines are equally valid (except, of course, serials are a thing of the past, and thus are mostly relegated to the print magazines). “Bookazines” like Destinies are an odd breed that blur the line between books and zines, but I’m ultimately counting those as magazines too. Some webzines are clearly modeled after magazines while some, like Tor.com, function more like blogs, with content being dished out one at a time as individual posts rather than in issues or volumes; as such I’m excluding the latter model of webzine from review (again sorry).
That’s it, I think.

If you want to reach me at my Twitter, here it is. I took a break from it for a few months but now I’m back. Also my Mastodon, although I have to admit I don’t look at it nearly as often and it’ll mostly just be posts I would be making for Twitter. Finally I made a Bluesky account, which despite still being in beta has given me more traffic than Mastodon. Sad!

“What about SFF movies? Won’t you ever review those?” Maybe, but probably not. If you really want you can read about my dumb movie and TV thoughts on my Letterboxd page.