Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Novella Review: “The Star-Pit” by Samuel R. Delany

September 17th, 2022

(Cover by Gray Morrow. Worlds of Tomorrow, February 1967.)

Who Goes There?

Of the SFF authors to have debuted in the ’60s, Samuel R. Delany may well be the best; it helps that his rise to prominence was swift, though it may not have seemed that way at first. Delany debuted with a novel (unlike most of his contemporaries he was a novelist first and foremost) titled The Jewels of Aptor, and quickly followed that up with a trilogy of novels known as the Fall of the Towers trilogy, which you can find as an omnibus. Perhaps the first big sign of Delany’s precocious genius (he was 19 when he wrote The Jewels of Aptor) was the 1965 novella “The Ballad of Beta-2,” which earned him his first Nebula nomination. 1966, however, would mark the beginning of a brief but intense streak which lasted until the end of 1968, as we got his first masterpiece, the Nebula-winning novel Babel-17, one of the few SF works of its time to be concerned chiefly with linguistics, as well as its companion novella “Empire Star.” Delany insisted the two be bundled together, but this did not happen for many years, with “Empire Star” instead being bundled with “The Ballad of Beta-2.”

1967 was the year Delany threw his hat into the ring of the short story, quickly showing that his daunting brilliance showed often just as much in the short form as with his novels and novellas, with “Driftglass,” “Corona,” and his Nebula-winning short story “Aye, and Gomorrah…” being nothing less than the work of an already-refined artist. We also got the Nebula-winning (see a pattern here?) novel The Einstein Intersection, and the following year we got perhaps the best novel from this first phase of his career, Nova, along with the Hugo- and Nebula-winning novelette “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” By the time this streak ended, with Delany’s output suddenly screeching to a halt at the end of the ’60s, he was all of 27 years old, and had won a record-breaking four Nebulas in as many years (plus a Hugo), not to mention seven novels in as many years (eight if we count They Fly at Çiron, though it wouldn’t be published until decades later). With the exception of maybe Roger Zelazny, there was no American author to have debuted in the ’60s who shone brighter than Delany.

If we focus too much on the first phase of Delany’s career when in a retrospective mood, I would say it’s for two reasons: firstly, he was incredibly productive at this time, with nearly half of his novels being published between 1962 and 1968, and secondly, it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary Delany was from pretty much the outset. For one thing, he was the first black SFF author of any significance; not to say he was the first black author to have written SFF (W. E. B. Du Bois comes to mind), but he was the first to specialize in SFF, and the first to make his mark in the magazines. “The Star-Pit” (the hyphen would be removed for reprints) was in fact his first story to see magazine publication, and by this point he had already established himself as a formidable force as a novelist. That Delany would only become more ambitious (if also more polarizing) once he came back from his hiatus goes to show the depths of his artistry.

Delany celebrated his 80th birthday this past April. Let’s hope he gets to celebrate another one.

Placing Coordinates

“The Star-Pit” was first published in the February 1967 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, which is on the Archive. A problem I often run into with novellas is that even the most famous of them don’t get reprinted as often as their short story counterparts (novella-focused anthologies have sadly never quite taken off), but you won’t have much of a problem finding this one. “The Star-Pit” has been reprinted a good number of times, in Judith Merril’s SF 12, in Robert Silverberg’s Alpha 5, in The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels (co-edited by Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg), in Gardner Dozois’s Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, and in Delany’s collection Driftglass. If you want a source that’s currently in print then look no further than Delany’s collection Aye, and Gomorrah: Stories, which, as far as I can tell, collects everything in Driftglass plus some later stories. Sadly, Delany was never that prolific in the short form, and it’s all too easy to get a one-volume collection of all of his non-series short works. While the man has been making a big difference by dedicating his time to academia for the past several decades, one has to shudder when thinking about how much more fiction he could’ve written.

Enhancing Image

The story opens with Vyme, our narrator, who at this early point is the father of several children and husbamd in a polygamous marriage. We find out quickly that in the culture Wyme took part in before coming to the Star-pit (more on that in a minute), plural marriage is the norm, and is basically codified for the purpose of producing and raising a myriad of children. The opening scene has Vyme with his oldest son, Antoni, and there’s an accident with a highly advanced terrarium, in which some “sloths” (they’re called that, but they’re described as being closer to small rodents) get loose. One of these sloths ventures too far from its enclosure, and it reacts violently when Wyme tries to retrieve it. The sloth appears to have gone crazy from being out in the sun too long. This whole scene, and the following conversation especially, may not strike us as plot-relevant, but it sets up an important thematic motif that Delany will return to later.

It snapped at me, and I jerked back. “Sun stroke, kid-boy. Yeah, it is crazy.”

Suddenly it opened its mouth wide, let out all its air, and didn’t take in any more. It’s all right now, I said.

Two more of the baby sloths were at the door, front cups over the sill, staring with bright, black eyes. I pushed them back with a piece of sea shell and closed the door. Antoni kept looking at the white fur ball on the sand. “Not crazy now?”

“It’s dead,” I told him.

“Dead because it went outside, da?”

I nodded.

The opening scene of “The Star-Pit” is a curious one, firstly because it’s something of a flashback (it takes place several years prior to most of the story), and also because it does not make Vyme look good, despite the fact that he’s the one narrating. First-person narrators, whether by design or through omission of detail, often come off as better than they probably were, which is not surprising; if you’re telling a story that involves you personally, you wanna make yourself look good—or at least not bad. Vyme reveals himself to be an unusually emotionally honest narrator, though, one who had made a serious mistake in the past which alienated him from the rest of his marriage group and prompted him to seek work off-planet. To make matters worse (this is not a spoiler, mind you), an unforeseen catastrophe takes Vyme’s partners and children from him; he can’t go home again, even if he wants to. Since then Vyme has basically started his life over as a mechanic at the Star-pit, a spaceport which oversees intergalactic ships as they bring back precious materials from distant worlds.

The big catch is that while space travel is common in this story’s universe, the vast majority of people can’t be space pilots; no, that position is reserved for only a tiny fraction of the population with very specific qualifications. The golden (as adjective and noun, singular and plural) are a set of people with a certain kind of psychosis and a certain hormonal imbalance which seemingly predisposes them to sociopathy (they’re often said to be stupid or mean, or both), but which also enables them to fly through deep space without going totally insane or dying. For most people, if you were to travel through space as such and such a speed for such and such a distance, you would lose your mind, then your life. The discovery of the golden was pure accident, and honestly it reminds me of the equally accidental discovery of jaunting in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. “The Star-Pit” and Nova are particularly reminiscent of Bester’s novel.

Through some freakish accident, two people had been discovered who didn’t crack up at twenty thousand light-years off the galactic rim, who didn’t die at twenty-five thousand.

They were both psychological freaks with some incredible hormone imbalance in their systems. One was a little oriental girl; the other was an older man, blond and big boned, from a cold planet circling Cygnus-beta: golden. They looked sullen as hell, both of them.

You may notice the one character being described as “oriental,” as is another character later on. I point this out because you may be taken aback slightly by Delany’s occasional outdated racial vocabulary (another character is described as “negroid”), which is nothing more than a product of its time. It’s also worth pointing out that Vyme is black, which is certainly a mundane details nowadays but would’ve been a rarity in SFF circa 1967. Not that such a thing was totally unheard of: Robert Heinlein and H. Beam Piper managed to sneak POC into their fiction, sometimes even all but stating a protagonist is non-white. Delany was the first, however, to write POC in magazine SFF from a non-white person’s perspective.

Anyway…

The golden are a different matter. I get strong Philip K. Dick vibes from this notion that in order to explore the vast reaches of space, it would be necessary to recruit slightly insane people who won’t go totally insane under the pressure. Golden are differentiated most apparently by the golden belts they’re required to wear, which does raise a question, and believe it or not it’s a question Delany answers: Wouldn’t it be a little too easy to pass off as a golden if you were to steal one of their belts? The thing of course is that a normal person would crack under the pressure, then die, if they were to take the role of a golden and head out for deep space—but suppose someone who’s more than a little suicidal were to do such a thing? By way of a dramatic action scene, we’re left early on with a golden’s ship without a golden to pilot it, and that’s where Ratlit comes in.

Ratlit may be the most interesting character in “The Star-Pit,” for his unusual traits and also for his ambiguity. Ratlit is a bestselling author, which is strange for two reasons: the first is that he was a literal child when he wrote it, only barely being in his teens when Vyme meets him, and the second is that he didn’t technically write it, on account of being illiterate. He had a novel dictated and it sold like crack, which I suppose makes him a child prodigy. Oh, and he really hates the golden—like really hates them, and yet he also wants to become a golden. I have to assume Ratlit just narrowly misses the qualifications for being deemed a golden, because he’s definitely an asshole, and he’s definitely an idiot. Admittedly, and I don’t think this is much of a spoiler to say, but every golden we come across in this novella is pretty much a moronic sociopath; they don’t care about other people, but they’re barely even functioning enough to take care of themselves.

Another character we’re introduced to who’s arguably even weirder than Ratlit, albeit relatively underdeveloped, is Alegra. Ratlit is a 13-year-old bestselling novelist while Alegra is a 15-year-old projecting telepath, meaning she can project her thoughts into other people’s minds. Oh, and she’s been a drug addict ever since she was an infant. Oh, and she worked as a psychiatrist (government backing and everything) when she was eight years old. Part of me has to wonder why Delany made the ages of some of his characters so goddamn low, to the point of maybe straining one’s suspension of disbelief. I have to assume he’s making a comment about child prodigies, being something of a child prodigy himself (he had read War & Peace when he was 12 or something), and the harmful ramifications of being such a young talent. Delany was 23 when he wrote “The Star-Pit,” and maybe at the time he feared he was already going to burn out as a writer. Maybe the age thing has to do with Vyme’s role as a former parent, as an adult who lost his children, though this angle doesn’t become pointed until later.

Ratlit and Alegra are both young and stupid, so naturally they hang out together a lot, and indeed their relationship may be more than just platonic. That neither of them is a golden when Vyme meets them is quite the coincidence, given their temperaments, and also quite a coincidence that they’re both child prodigies. But then, at least according to Vyme, having two such people in the same place may not be so coincidental, given the function of the Star-pit and the government’s mad scramble for more golden.

Fifteen-year-old ex-psychiatrist drug addict? Same sort of precocity that produces thirteen-year-old novelists. Get used to it.

It’s this remark (along with a few others) that makes me think Delany is trying to articulate his position as someone who was a highly precocious teenager, to the point of having a published novel by the time he was twenty. He could’ve been either an artist or a madman—or going back to Dick, he could’ve been both. It’s weird because the lectures and interviews I’ve seen of Delany make him come off as a very well-adjusted person, despite some of the drama that’s happened in his life. You see, on top of being black, growing up in an era where racial segregation was still the norm, Delany is also gay. Or maybe bisexual, there’s some debate as to what his orientation “really” is. Point being that Delany is pretty far from straight, and his queerness would not be made known to the SFF readership at large until quite a few years after his initial rise to prominence.

You can see there are a few threads going on here.

Delany’s chief concerns in this story seem to be with ethics—nay, the mere possibility of space travel—as well as parent-child relationships. I’ll talk about the former more because it holds a greater interest in an SF context. While Delany’s novella is by no means the first to deconstruct the typically gung ho attitude people have about space travel (I’m thinking of Edmond Hamilton’s masterful short story “What’s It Like Out There?”), it goes about the question in a way that probably would not have seen print a mere decade earlier. For reasons I’ll elaborate on in the spoilers section, the problem of intergalactic travel is particularly tricky here, because the only people qualified to pilot such ships must be mentally ill. Mental illness occupies the very core of “The Star-Pit,” and everything would fall apart if Delany’s exploration of the golden (who, make no mistake, are all people suffering from mental illness, with experienced golden also suffering from PTSD) didn’t ring true on some level. Thankfully, like everything else, Delany’s exploration is humane, thought-provoking, and has real human blood running in its veins.

There Be Spoilers Here

Tragedy strikes once again.

I had alluded earlier to how easy it would be to take a golden’s belt and pass off as one, and that’s what Ratlit does. Ratlit, who doesn’t quite make the cut to be a golden, takes someone’s golden belt—Alegra’s. In a revelation which admittedly doesn’t strike me as all that plausible, Alegra is diagnosed as a golden, at age 15 (golden are typically “found” when they’re in grade school), and she tells Ratlit and Vyme the “good news.” This is actually a very bad thing, though we don’t find out why until it’s far too late. See, the problem is that Alegra is a drug addict, and withdrawal is strong enough to kill her; she must be on the stuff, or else. There is another complication that, in practice, prevents her from going to space, and it’s the fact that she’s pregnant—apparently with Ratlit’s kid.

The more I think about this, the darker it sounds. Which it really is. It’s also fucked up that Ratlit and Alegra find themselves in a catch-22 where Alegra won’t survive space travel in the shape she’s in, and neither will Ratlit (for different reasons), yet Ratlit wants to go so badly and and he must’ve realized at some point that there will be no happy ending. Alegra goes through withdrawal, and Vyme isn’t able to get the drug for her in time. Ratlit goes out to space, with Alegra’s golden belt, never to be seen again. Two kids whom Vyme has gotten to know, sort of like surrogate children for him, are both taken away in what feels like the blink of an eye. An abortion would’ve saved Alegra maybe, but according to Vyme no such safe options are available on the Star-pit. It’s a horrific situation, but it only gets worse once we get all the details after the fact.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but when someone runs off and abandons a sick girl like that, it gets me. That was the trip to Carlson’s, the one last little favor Ratlit never came back from. On the spot results, and formal confirmation in seven days. In her physical condition, pregnancy would have been as fatal as the withdrawal. And she was too ill for any abortive method I know of not to kill her. On the spot results. Ratlit must have known all that too when he got the results back, the results that Alegra was probably afraid of, the results she sent him to find. Ratlit knew Alegra was going to die anyway. And so he stole a golden belt. “Loving someone, I mean really loving someone—” Alegra had said. When someone runs off and leaves a sick girl like that, there’s got to be a reason. It came together for me like two fissionables. The explosion cut some moorings in my head I thought were pretty solidly fixed.

A gripe I do have with “The Star-Pit” is that the action reaches its climax with Alegra dying and Ratlit going on his suicide run, but when this all happens we’re not quite three quarters into the story. “The Star-Pit” is a 50-page story in its magazine publication, and the Ratlit/Alegra plot takes up maybe 30 pages, when really I wish it took up a larger chunk. Thematically we get a continuation with a new golden, a teenager nicknamed An, who brings things full circle, but the drama has deflated by this point, despite Delany’s best efforts to enfuse Vyme’s own personal drama with the right amount of pathos. We start and end with Vyme himself, who despite being reasonably good at his job is otherwise grief-stricken, a drunk, and objectively an irresponsible parent. Is he a drunk because he’s an irresponsible parent, or an irresponsible parent because he’s a drunk?

And what of the golden? The golden are the only people qualified to travel between galaxies, yet they’re qualified partly because they’re treated as pariahs by the rest of mankind, and their seeming incapability to get along with other people further reinforces their pariah status. A normal person will likely hate a golden, but will also likely be envious of them. The new golden in the story’s third act, An, has a tiny terrarium he takes around with him, and we’re taken back to the so-called sloth that went outside its enclosure and went mad. The golden venture outside their enclosure (the enclosure being the human family) and are thus crazy—only they do not necessarily die from it. Ratlit wants desperately to become a golden because he thinks his life on the Star-pit is constraining, claustrophobic, horrible, but the golden are not exactly free to do whatever they want.

Delany seems to be making an argument about the need for human interaction, and more importantly for human warmth. Vyme and his assistant Sandy (whom I didn’t even get to mention until now) are both exiles, having been permanently separated from their group marriages, trying to find redemption (or at least solace) in their work on the Star-pit, only to find that their characters have not grown stronger, their stars no brighter than before. While we don’t learn too much about the mechanics of these group marriages which have become commonplace (for instance, homosexuality is implied but never delved into), we get the strong impression that these men are worse off for having cut themselves off from their partners, Vyme because of a war which caught his family in the crossfire and Sandy because his former partners no longer want him to return. In practically every corner you look, there’s tragedy, and a yearning to transcend that tragedy—to break through the barrier, or the walls of one’s terrarium.

A Step Farther Out

I have a few small issues, mainly having to do with plausibility, but upon close inspection I think “The Star-Pit” stands out as one of Delany’s early masterworks, as well as a relatively accessible demonstration of his craft. Delany would get more experimental very shortly, but when he was writing “The Star-Pit” he must’ve been at a crossroads, at the bridge between a promising beginner and a refined craftsman. It helps that Delany’s ascension to the forefront of SFF was at a mile a minute, with him seemingly learning an important lesson with every project he finished. By the time he wrote Nova, a little over a year after he wrote “The Star-Pit,” Delany had all but perfectly balanced his penchant for flamboyance and lyricism with his immense talent as a writer of space opera—maybe the only great writer of space opera to come out of the ’60s. “The Star-Pit” is moody, deeply tragic, often filled to the brim with ideas, but it’s not rushed; it almost feels more like a compressed novel than a true novella, but it ultimately feels well-realized. Most importantly, it feels human in a way that a lot of New Wave-era science fiction doesn’t, only one thing of many that made Delany special.

1968 was the first year the Hugos had an award for Best Novella, which if you ask me was a long time coming, but better late than never. The inaugural Best Novella shortlist is also stacked, with Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” and Anne McCaffrey’s “Weyr Search” tying for the Hugo. “The Star-Pit” was also nominated, though weirdly it was not also nominated for the Nebula. I must admit I have a considerable soft spot for Farmer’s story (though most people seem to hate it), and I’m rather indifferent to McCaffrey’s, but I think at least from a modern perspective it’s fair to say Delany’s story should’ve won. “The Star-Pit” is a remarkable exploration of a question which especially occupied hard SF since at least the Campbell era, and which retains strong relevance thanks to a certain oligarch and his space program: Are we sure we ought to go to space? Not just the moon (we’ve already been there), or the other planets of our solar system, but beyond the Milky Way… beyond what our technology is currently capable of giving us, but which we may be able to reach in a few generations. We’ll have to sit on a hill, or at the top of a mountain, and we’ll have to look up at the stars and ask ourselves the question posed at the very end of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth:

“What do we do…?”

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson (Part 1/3)

September 13th, 2022

(Cover by Charles Schneeman. Astounding, May 1938.)

Who Goes There?

Jack Williamson made his debut in 1928 with “The Metal Man,” in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. While not the oldest author we’ve covered so far (Clifford Simak is a few years older than him), Williamson is remarkable for his versatility and longevity, and he debuted before Simak, first being published when he was only twenty years old. Williamson started out as an SF author of the Gernsbackian mode, being close contemporaries with E. E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton, guys who wrote fast and often sloppily in the hopes of getting as many stories published as quickly as possible—and why not? The pulps generally didn’t pay well, and Gernsback was especially notorious for being slow to pay his writers. Still, Williamson persisted, and when Astounding Science Fiction started hitting its stride in 1934 he jumped ship pretty readily, giving us perhaps the most notable SF novel of that year, The Legion of Space. But whereas Smith and Hamilton remained most known for their grand space operas, and while Williamson was no slouch in that department, he would soon branch out and reveal an almost startling intelligence.

When John W. Campbell took over Astounding in late 1937, not immediately making his mark but gradually reshaping the magazine in his own image over the next two years, most of the Gernsback-era authors failed to adjust; Williamson, however, was not one of them. While he would never again reach the level of productivity of his first decade, Williamson not only survived the coming of Campbell but became one of the brighter (albeit relatively infrequent) stars in Campbell’s stable. From this period (1938 to about 1950), Williamson wrote the famous novelette “With Folded Hands…” and its follow-up novel …And Searching Mind (published in book form as The Humanoids), the equally inventive and deliciously atmospheric horror novella “Darker Than You Think” (published in Unknown, Astounding‘s arguably superior sister magazine), and the short novel that we’re starting today, The Legion of Time. Contrary to what its title may imply, The Legion of Time is not connected to the Legion of Space series, but is indeed a totally standalone work; the folks at ISFDB seem confused about it, since it’s classified as part of a series there—a series where it’s the only entry.

In the ’50s Williamson devoted much of his time to going back to school, where he would write a respectable thesis on H. G. Wells and would, in the process, become one of the first people to bring SF to the world of higher education. Still, he never strayed from the field as a writer for too long, with the occasional solo effort or collaboration (especially with Frederik Pohl) popping up to remind people that Williamson was still in the game. In 1985 he won a Hugo for his autobiography, Wonder’s Child, which details not only his early life but his long and ongoing relationship with SF. He won another Hugo in 2001, this time for Best Novella, for “The Ultimate Earth,” which became part of his novel Terraforming Earth. Williamson was 93 when he won that second Hugo. When Williamson died in 2006, he was still very much active, and he immediately stood out as having (to this day, as far as I can tell) the longest career of any SF author at 78 years. Like Hailey’s Comet, which can appear at the beginning and end of a person’s long life, Williamson lived to witness not only the prehistoric dawn of the Gernsback era but the neon sunrise of 21st century SF.

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 of The Legion of Time appeared in the May 1938 issue of Astounding. It’s on the Archive. Despite being long enough to qualify as a full novel (albeit barely), The Legion of Time has mostly been printed in book form as part of a bundle, most often with another short work of Williamson’s from that period, “After World’s End.” It has also been collected in Spider Island, which is the fourth volume of Williamson’s collected stories. It’s worth noting that The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson has eight volumes, and stories published between 1928 and 1938 comprise the first four. Despite not being reprinted too often (I’ve never seen a copy in the wild), and despite not being one of Williamson’s most famous works (though it is undoubtedly considered major), it garnered a Retro Hugo nomination for Best Novel. You could argue the pool for eligible novels (never mind the quality) from 1938 has to do with it, but I would also argue the nomination was well-earned.

Enhancing Image

We start out with a quartet of college boys: Dennis Lanning, Wilmot McLan, Barry Halloran, and Lao Meng Shan. Lanning passes the time by himself in the apartment he shares with the homies by reading a scientific paper by McLan, the latter seeming to be the most intelligent and well-read of the bunch, and of course it’s about time travel.

Deep-hidden in its abstruse mathematics, Lanning had sensed an exciting meaning. He leaned back, with tired eyes closing, trying to complete the tantalizing picture he had glimpsed through the mist of symbols on the page. The book began with Minkowski’s famous dictum: “Space in itself, and Time in itself, sink to mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two retains a kind of independent existence.”

Was Time, then, another extension of the universe; to-morrow as real as yesterday? What if one could leap forward—?

It takes all of three pages (I’m not kidding, three pages) for the plot to kick in as, in the midst of reading his friend’s paper, Lanning comes into contact with a mysterious woman—or rather the specter of a mysterious woman, who appears spontaneously out of nothingness. The woman is almost impossibly beautiful, and because Lanning is a young man circa 1927 who’s had zero pussy in his life, he instantly falls for her. The woman is Lethonee, someone from a future society called Jonbar, and while she can’t interact physically with Lanning, she stays long enough to warn him about her dark counterpart—an evil girlboss named Sorainya who comes from another future society called Gyronchi. Jonbar has milk and cookies while Gyronchi is a shithole, apparently. Lanning at first doubts the validity of this chance encounter, after Lethonee has vanished, but because this is a pulp SF story from the ’30s it doesn’t take long for him to get over that small hiccup.

A few things struck me immediately. The first is Williamson wastes absolutely no time in introducing the conflict, and he also makes no bones about who’s good and who’s bad. It’s not a spoiler at all to say Lethonee is the good girlboss while Sorainya is the bad girlboss, and that Lanning will, at some point, come to the side of Jonbar, which is obviously the goody-two-shoes side. What makes this interesting is that while Sorainya is a villain, she’s by no means unattractive or unappealing, embodying one of my favorite tropes in old-timey pulp fiction: the sexy villainness whose assertiveness and cunning makes (let’s face it) the female love interest look bland by comparison. While there’s no question that Lenning will ultimately end up with Lethonee, it’s not as quite as east as that, but more on that later.

Another thing that struck me is that we’re not given a totally conventional depiction of time travel here, and it still feels somewhat unorthodox in the year 2022. This is not like The Terminator or Back to the Future, or even Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps,” because future actors cannot directly impact the subjective present. When Lethonee and Sorainya appear to Lanning they appear as ghosts, being seen but unable to interact physically with the present; they can, however, influence the present in more indirect ways. Lanning and Halloran are both aviators, and Lethonee convinces Lanning to not go flying solo on a specific day, as she suspects Sorainya has a trap for him—a trap that seems to instead get Halloran, who dies in a freak accident but whose body is conspicuously not recovered. You probably have an idea as to what happened with Halloran, but I urge you to hold onto that thought. The point is that Sorainya basically tempts Lanning more than once to kill himself, or rather to put himself in a situation where he dies in an untimely manner. Good pussy will do that.

I’m not sure if The Legion of Time was bought by Campbell or by F. Orlin Tremaine, Astounding‘s previous editor. Sure, Campbell was in full control by then, but story purchases tend to be carried over between editors, and Tremaine had only been gone a few months; still, Campbell had say on what got published, and this feels out of character for him. I say this because Campbell, while he was undoubtedly a Promethean figure and an innovator in the field, was a puritan (among other things). Sex, even implicitly or metaphorically, rarely showed up in the fiction of Campbell’s Astounding, yet The Legion of Time stands out as being unquestionably and almost unapologetically horny. We get something like a love triangle where the two female leads (having two female leads, imagine that) each try to get the male hero to do her bidding, and at least part of this is done via sexual temptation. The descriptions of Lethonee’s physical beauty are one thing, but Sorainya’s sexual ferocity is not only undeniable but plays an actual role in the plot, as I’ll explain in the spoilers section.

This is not to downplay the story’s ingenuinity with its time travel mechanics, which are quite intriguing. Lanning, unbeknownst to himself, plays a pivotal role in the advents of Jonbar and Gyronchi, and Lethonee does an admirable job of throwing exposition at him to explain how these two societies are related and how the interplay between present and future works. Mind you we’re talking about the subjective present (Lanning’s present), and not some kind of past; the past has already happened, but conversely, the future is but a phantom of itself.

“The World is a long corridor, from the Beginning of existence to the End. Events are groups in a sculptured frieze that runs endlessly along the walls. And Time is a lantern carried steadily through the hall, to illuminate the groups one by one. It is the light of awareness, the subjective reality of consciousness.

“Again and again the corridor branches, for it is the museum of all that is possible. The bearer of the lantern may take one turning, or another. And so, many halls that might have been illuminated with reality are left forever in the darkness.

“My world of Jonbar is one such possible way. It leads through splendid halls, bright vistas that have no limit. Gyronchi is another. But it is a barren track, through narrowing, ugly passages, that comes to a dead and useless end.”

Not unlike how the Time Traveler in Wells’s The Time Machine jumps forward 800,000 years to see the grotesque future of mankind, divided between the feeble-minded Eloi and the ruthless Morlocks, Lanning glimpses into a future where mankind either flourishes or devolves into a kind of techno-fascism. The catch is that these are two different futures, and they do not exist on the same physical plane. It’s here that we are introduced to what has to be one of the first (if not the first) time wars in SF history, involving not just one future timeline but several conflicting timelines. That Williamson came up with this premise circa 1937 is astounding in itself, but it’s how he rationalizes what sounds pretty far out that gets me. It’s an adventure yarn, sure, but it’s an adventure yarn brimming with ideas, not to mention red hot blood in its veins.

There Be Spoilers Here

We only get something like a clear answer as to the mechanics of time travel in this story’s universe when Lanning dies—or does he? As it turns out, it was more important that Lanning live long enough to get to a certain point in his life than for him to perform a specific action; Sorainya spends much of Part 1 trying to kill Lanning, so as to prevent him from bringing about the existence of Jonbar, but conversely there’s a right time for him to die, and die he does, under circumstances not dissimilar from Halloran’s. As if by magic, Lanning finds himself recovering on a ship called the Chronion, a time-traveling vessel that picks up soldiers at the time of their deaths, revives them, and recruits them into the forces of Jonbar. Lanning reunites with Halloran, who hadn’t died (not permanently, anyway) after all, but rather was snatched up at the time of his death; while years had passed for Lanning, time had only gone by a few days in Halloran’s subjective present.

Two things here. The first is that I honestly have to wonder if Fritz Leiber found inspiration in this for his Change War series, because the time war in that series is eerily similar to the deal with Jonbar and Gyronchi, what with people from throughout history being recruited into both sides. The second is that while this has to be a coincidence, I can’t help but feel like the Chronion is a distant precursor to the Epoch from Chrono Trigger. Sorry, was that a video game reference? Pardon me. I’m curious about what influence this short novel has had on future time travel fiction, considering it doesn’t get brought up often, and yet it must be said that Williamson’s concocting of the time travel shenanigans here is genuinely innovative, even if the prose itself doesn’t indicate as such.

Not only is Halloran aboard, but so is McLan! Unfortunately, despite the fact that it had only been a decade for Lanning, many more years have passed for McLan, who’s been (from his viewpoint) in this fight for a long time. Not only that, but his own encounter with Sorainya was not a happy one; she fucked him up pretty good. Now a decrepit old man, McLan now acts as Mr. Exposition—which is an important title for this sort of thing. Lethonee had explained to Lanning how time works before, but McLan’s explains the situation more concretely and with 50% more technobabble.

“The crux of it all is this: If Jonbar exists, Gyronchi can not. And equally, if Sorainya exists—Lethonee never comes to be. Each of those cities—each of those women—represents a possible future, a possible epoch. And—they represent different possibilities of the same epoch.

“Each has the secret of Time. But neither can, by any means whatever, reach the other! They can see each other—but they cannot reach or affect each other. Those doctors of Jonbar aboard the Chronion—they cannot reach Gyronchi, even though this ship goes down the geodesics that lead there. They cannot—for Gyronchi and Jonbar, and all things of either city are mutually exclusive. Either is possible—but not both!

“Each is possible—but because of my blundering, I know now that the geodesics of Gyronchi are far stronger. The probability of Gyronchi is far greater.”

Now, when it comes to time travel there’s always the big question: Is the future fixed or flexible? Are things predetermined to happen? Does everything work in a loop? A rule of thumb is that the more flexible the future is, the more optimistic the story is, in which case The Legion of Time is very much optimistic; the future in this novel is a work in progress. Williamson comes close to entering multiverse territory by playing with probabilities and divering paths, with Jonbar and Gyronchi trying to prevent the other’s existence by making that existence increasingly improbable. The reason why actors from the future aren’t able to physically interact with the present is because said actors are little more than theoretical in their existence. We very much want Jonbar to win because the alternative is a future where mankind is ultimately destroyed by a race of giant uplifted insects. That’s right, we get BEMs here, but Williamson gets away with it by focusing on the human drama.

A Step Farther Out

So far I’m excited about The Legion of Time, but I’ve been burned before. The two previous serials I reviewed started out strong but then weakened by the end, with the authors seemingly frontloading their stories with their best ideas and most disciplined writing. I suspect the same will be true of Williamson’s novel to some extent, but I hope it’s only minor. I honestly struggle to imagine how you’re supposed to top the latter half of Part 1, but then again, we’re only just being introducsed to a conflict that’s way bigger than any one person. While none of the three leads are complexly characterized, they don’t need to be; for one it’s unusual to have two thirds of your main cast be female in an SF story published in 1938, but it’s also appropriate to think of our leads as like sentient chess pieces on a board. Williamson’s treatment of sexuality is remarkably frank for its time, and his formulation of probability-based time travel is nothing short of prescient. Some will take issue with the super-brisk pacing and the gosh-wow style that defined pulp fiction of that era, but I don’t mind it really. I don’t feel like my time is being wasted.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Blind Minotaur” by Michael Swanwick

September 10th, 2022

(Cover by Larry Elmore. Amazing Stories, March 1985.)

Who Goes There?

Michael Swanwick has been in the game for over forty years, and shows no sign of slowing down. He debuted in 1980 with a pair of short stories, “Ginungagap” and “The Feast of Saint Janis,” both of which would garner Nebula nominations—not something you see every day with someone’s first work. Swanwick would continue to put out mostly short stories, somewhat sporadically, throughout the ’80s, and even at this early point in his career it was clear he was a writer of a different caliber than most of his peers. While Swanwick did sometimes contribute to then-newfangled cyberpunk scene (see “Dogfight,” his collaboration with William Gibson), he would ultimately be hard to pin down as either a cyberpunk or as one of the so-called humanists; the truth is that Swanwick’s influences are markedly different from those of William Gibson or Kim Stanley Robinson. It also took the SFF world a frustratingly long time to recognize Swanwick’s talents; despite his two Nebula nominations from the outset, it would take another decade for him to win one, coming with his masterful and bewildering 1991 novel Stations of the Tide.

1985 was a big year for Swanwick, though by no means the last of those big years (it’s honestly hard to find Swanwick at a point where he’s not on top of things). Not only did we see In the Drift, his debut novel (greatly expanded from his earlier short story “Mummer Kiss”), but we got some major early short stories from him, including the aforementioned “Dogfight” and the solo story “The Transmigration of Philip K.” Oh yeah, and we got “The Blind Minotaur.” Now, whereas a lot of Swanwick’s early work would appear in either Omni or Asimov’s Science Fiction, “The Blind Minotaur” appeared in Amazing Stories, which surprisingly was still a thing at the time. Why did I pick “The Blind Minotaur” and not something more famous by Swanwick? For one, I was grabbed by the title. I hadn’t read it before, and I’d been meaning to get more into Swanwick’s early stuff. I could’ve reviewed one of his more famous stories, like “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” but I wanted to tackle something more obscure.

Placing Coordinates

“The Blind Minotaur” was first published in the March 1985 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. It hasn’t been reprinted much, unfortunately, and both of the major books it’s been reprinted in are themselves out of print now. First we have Swanwick’s short story collection Gravity’s Angels, released in 1991 (also a major year for Swanwick) and comprising most of the short fiction from the first decade of his career. There’s also Gardner Dozois’s anthology The Good New Stuff, which focuses on adventure SF from the late ’70s to the late ’90s, and this would be combined with its predecessor, The Good Old Stuff, to form The Good Stuff. None of these are hard to find used; if I remember right I got The Good Stuff for no more than $15, which ain’t half bad considering it’s two anthologies in one. There’s also the more obscure anthology Bestiary!, co-edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann, which collects stories about mythical creatures reappropriated in modern SFF fiction.

Enhancing Coordinates

We’re on a far-off planet where the Minotaur, a man with a bull’s head, is being guided by his supposed daughter Yarrow. We never learn the Minotaur’s name, but we soon learn that he is immensely strong and respected, or at least conscpicuous among the normal off-worlders. He’s also blind. Despite his lack of sight, though, his other senses are impeccable, having been heightened by his blindness. Even so, without his sight he needs help getting around.

This was not the replacement world spoken of and promised to the blind. It was chaotic and bewildering, rich and contradictory in detail. The universe had grown huge and infinitely complex with the dying of the light, and had made him small and helpless in the process.

The Minotaur is an immortal, which we don’t get a clear definition of at first, but we at least get the sense that he does not age, though apparently immortals can’t heal naturally. I feel like in this far-future setting it’d be possible to get eye implants, but whatever. Of course, it’s not entirely futuristic; the setting, which is not described in great detail, comes off almost more ancient than futuristic. Within a few pages I’m reminded of Roger Zelazny’s fiction, especially This Immortal and Lord of Light, not to mention Creatures of Light and Darkness, although “The Blind Minotaur” doesn’t straddle the line between SF and fantasy as much. What Swanwick also takes from Zelazny is a curious balance between elegant prose descriptions and a penchant for the vulgar; this story right here is poetic at times, but it’s also horny. Part of me wonders if, even in the ’80s, certain magazine editors had reservations about publishing sexually explicit content. George H. Scithers, then the editor for Amazing Stories, was by no means a prude, but his tenure at Asimov’s Science Fiction showed a lack of keenness for printing edgy material.

While I do find it a bit eyebrow-raising that several women throughout hit up the Minotaur (I feel like having sex with a man who has a bull’s head would make one hesitate), in fairness it’s said that the Minotaur is pretty physically in shape. I mean, not that I’m not into that or anything, but Hank Jankus’s interior artwork paints the Minotaur as a snack, all things considered. Not helping matters is the fact that he’s mostly naked for the whole thing.

We jump back and forth between the past and present, between the Minotaur’s current life as something akin to a bum, his daughter keeping him company, and his past as a vigorous circus performer, picking up babes and working with his friend and colleague, the Harlequin. The result is a story that feels more like two short-shorts in one, but both of these feel rather unfinished—not in the prose department, as Swanwick is excellent as always on a sentence-by-sentence level, but rather in how the Minotaur’s blindness rubs off on the reader. It could also be that I’m a big dummy and that there are vital pieces of information I missed that would, in fact, create a more complete and satisfying narrative.

This is a story that’s both easy and hard to spoil, because Swanwick doesn’t let us in on what’s going on all the time. There’s enough material implied here for at least a novella, but at 15 pages, we’re only given what feels like mere glimpses into a bvast future world. We know that the Minotaur, the Harlequin, and the Woman are immortals, and being immortals apparently gives them both superhuman abilities and a certain privilege in a society where the vast majority of people are normal humans. The Harlequin, as befits his title, is something like a court jester, both the Minotaur’s best friend in his memories and something of a mischievous tormenter. Immortals don’t have names, but instead have titles; I’m not sure if the immortals picked their own titles or if the Lords (a highly advanced alien race we’re not given much info on) had bestowed these titles upon them.

There Be Spoilers Here

While the Minotaur is indeed blind during scenes set in the present, his memories of life before he lost his sight are relatively vivid, although there are still questions left unanswered. I never figured out why (at least on a first read) the Minotaur had killed the Harlequin, though there’s not much of a mystery as to why he would gouge his own eyes out. The closest I can come to finding an explanation is that it has to do with jealousy over the Woman (we’re never told what the Woman represents, but given that the Minotaur and the Harlequin are modeled after figures or archetypes, I suspect the Woman is a stand-in for the Biblical Eve). Despite his violent past, the Minotaur has become something of a mystic since then—not a messianic figure, but rather a monk who does not adhere strictly to a particular faith. Blinding himself seemed to unlock a door in his mind, and with it the Minotaur experienced what we might call violent transcendence, or a violent breakthrough. This is all an early attempt on Swanwick’s part to capture, in a way that strikes me as vaguely Catholic (think Flannery O’Connor), transcendence by way of physical brutality, and it’s by no means his last attempt.

By the end of the story, the Minotaur has chilled out and accepted Yarrow as his daughter, if not biologically then spiritually. In their final scene together, we get reconcilitation between these characters, but we also get kind of a subtle info dump (more the shadow of an info dump than the real thing) about the Lords and the immortals, which up till now had been little more than mentioned in passing.

Yarrow did not move away. There was a slight tremble in her voice when she spoke. “You still haven’t told me anything.”

“Ah,” the Minotaur said. For a moment he was silent, mentally cataloging what she would need to know. The history of the Lords, to begin with. Their rise to power, how they had shaped and orchestrated the human psyche, and why they thought the human race had to be held back. She needed to know of the creches, of their bioprogramming chemicals, and of those immortals released from them who had gone on to become legend. She needed to know everything about the immortals, in fact, for the race had been all but exterminated in the Wars. And how the Lords had endured as long as they had. How their enemies had turned their toys against them. All the history of the Wars. It would not be a short telling.

The Lords are implied to be a forerunner race which had uplifted humanity, or at least had helped guide humanity’s development. It’s also at this point that we’re all but told that the so-called immortals are genetically engineered humanoids (though I’m not sure if they’re normal humans that had been altered, or humans who were engineered to be this way from birth), with the Minotaur being one of them. The story’s ending is a somewhat open one, with the Minotaur, now reconciled with Yarrow, about to make a public speech to passersby about not his past in particular, but the past that led to his creation: the Lords, the wars which caused their downfall, the immortals, everything.

If “The Blind Minotaur” doesn’t seem to have a beginning or end (you could shuffle some of these scenes around and wind up with the same effect), it may be because mythology itself is cyclical. The Minotaur itself is an ancient Greek mythological figure, with the head of a bull and the body of a man, and the Minotaur of Swanwick’s story does indeed strike me as being an acient figure himself; not only is his age ambiguous (though surely he must be very old), but his equally ancient worldview does not even run counter much with the future society he now lives in. Basically the only piece of clothing we see the Minotaur wear is a loincloth, and in flashbacks we find that he was also a circus performer, and perhaps more subtly, a male prostitute. Of course, circus performance is its own form of prostitution, and prostitution is often said to be the oldest profession. The distant past and the distant future have converged, resulting in a world where myth and reality have become indistinguishable.

A Step Farther Out

This story, as with a lot of Swanwick’s, is both allusive and elusive; we don’t get clear answers to the Minotaur’s backstory, as if the Minotaur losing his sight also affected his ability to remember his own past, his memories becoming interchangeable with his dreams. There is a great deal of implied lore, but due to the story’s length, along with the fact that it’s a standalone, we’re kept at arm’s length as to what the hell is going on behind the scenes. As such, we’re also not allowed to relate to the Minotaur too much, since his ability to both operate in the present and recall his past is crippled. Swanwick would (I would say more successfully) experiment further with commenting on myth with far-future settings in his later works, especially Stations of the Tide (itself a retelling of Shakepeare’s The Tempest). At this point in his career, Swanwick’s ambitions were becoming clear, though it’s clear that he was trying to iron out the wrinkles in his technique.

“The Blind Minotaur” catches Swanwick when his influences are at their most overt. For one he’s a big fan of Philip K. Dick, and this had been apparent since the beginning; less apparent are the debts he owes to Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany, although “The Blind Minotaur” stands as practically an homage to both. In his introduction to the story in The Good New Stuff, Dozois notes Swanwick’s inventiveness as well as his nods to Dick, Zelazny, and Delany.

Another big influence on Swanwick, as on [Bruce] Sterling, was clearly the early work of Samuel R. Delany; this is especially clear with the evocative story that follows, “The Blind Minotaur,” which rings with strong echoes of Delany’s work, particularly The Einstein Intersection—although, as always, Swanwick has changed the melody line and the orchestration and the fingering to make the material uniquely his own.”

Delany’s The Einstein Intersection and Zelazny’s This Immortal and Lord of Light are SF novels that transfer mythical and/or religious figures to settings where they very much don’t belong; in the Delany, for instance, the non-human characters (humanity itself having died out a long time ago) take the forms of human mythological figures in an effort to make sense of the now-dead culture. “The Blind Minotaur” is indeed evocative, but it’s also often ambiguous, and Swanwick seemed to leave his world deliberately unfinished, with a lot of holes left in the background. After a first reading I can’t say I entirely made sense of it, but I did enjoy it, and a like much of Swanwick’s work I suspect it’ll only get stronger upon rereading and further reflection.

See you next time.
Serial Review: If This Goes On— by Robert Heinlein (Part 2/2)

September 6th, 2022

(Cover by Gilmore. Astounding, March 1940.)

Who Goes There?

Need I introduce you to Robert Heinlein again? You probably know him already, either by reputation or because you’ve read a portion of his considerable body of work. Heinlein debuted in 1939 and became the most popular writer of SF in just a couple years; he remains the only person aside from John W. Campbell to have been made Guest of Honor at Worldcon three times. People love and hate him—occasionally at the same time! Yet he remains a seminal figure, most of his work remains very much in print, and at his best he continues to teach us. If This Goes On— was Heinlein’s longest story up to that point, and when it was serialized in February and March 1940, it was revolutionary in both its content and its impact.

Curiously, despite its themes, If This Goes On— has never been so much as nominated for induction in the Prometheus Hall of Fame, although its sequel, “Coventry,” is an inductee. I have to assume this is because the libertarian revolution thing was already well-covered with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which is, after all, far more advanced, more complicated, and more enjoyable than its precursor. It did, however, win the Retro Hugo for Best Novella of 1940, beating out no less than two other Heinlein novellas (the aforementioned “Coventry” along with “Magic, Inc.”) along with the first two Harold Shea stories by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, “The Roaring Trumpet” and “The Mathematics of Magic.” Did it deserve the win? I’m gonna say no. For one thing, even if we’re comparing the Heinlein novellas, “Magic, Inc.” is no less inventive while also packing a tighter narrative thrust, and a good sense of humor to boot. Really the whole shortlist could’ve been from Unknown, as its contents have aged more gracefully by and large than what came out of Astounding.

There are a couple Heinlein biographies out there, but if you want more insight into the man’s early career then I highly recommend Alexei and Cory Panshin’s unrivaled tome on the Golden Age of SF, The World Beyond the Hill, which focuses more on Heinlein’s artistic evolution, and also Alec Nevala-Lee’s much more recent book Astounding, which focuses more on Heinlein as a person. The former especially illuminates us about the place If This Goes On— holds in SF’s history, it being the first of Heinlein’s great experiments, not only cementing what would be known as his Future History but also paving the way for a kind of SF which genuinely anticipates future possibilities based on current trends. In other words, it would serve as a foundational document for Campbellian SF.

Placing Coordinates

The March 1940 issue of Astounding is on the Archive. I’m not sure where else the magazine version of If This Goes On— appears. I know Heinlein went back and revised it a decade or so later for inclusion in the collection Revolt in 2100, and if what I’m reading here is correct, the changes were indeed substantial. Still, it was the magazine version which won the Retro Hugo (though it wouldn’t surprise me if voters were going off the Revolt in 2100 version), and if you can believe it, Part 2 is even shorter than Part 1. I would have to guess that, when the parts are combined, we have a longish novella of about 35,000 words. Two-part serials are a tricky thing, because depending on the magazine (we’re talking type size, margins, overall dimensions), a two-part serial could total anywhere from as low as 20,000 words (a novella, but barely) to 50,000 words or more (a full novel). If only there was an easy way to calculate all this.

Enhancing Image

You may recall that at the end of Part 1, John Lyle, our brave hero, had gone undergone with someone else’s identity—a ruse that lasted all of about five minutes. Soon enough he’s on the run again! The opening stretch of Part 2 is an extended chase scene, with John hijacking a ship and blazing through several states in the west and midwest.

Provo is not a particularly large town and might not be expected to have a particularly alert police force, but Utah has been a center of heresy and schism ever since the Mormon Church was suppressed, during the lifetime of the First Prophet.

Once again we come across maybe the most interesting part of If This Goes On—, and it’s actually not territory that Heinlein would return to for many years (although he had started working on Stranger in a Strange Land in the ’40s), which is the topic of religion. I was surprised to find an overt reference to Mormonism here, for one because it’s a pretty divisive sect, and also because it’s a pretty obscure sect, very few people would know anything factually correct about it, let alone anyone who was a practicing Mormon (though it must be noted that contemporary SF author Raymond F. Jones, who we might cover eventually, was a Mormon). It also further establishes a link between the future world of the story and the current reality, or you know, what would’ve been the current reality in 1940.

Part 2 of If This Goes On— is hard to summarize, not because so much happens, but because not enough happens. Let’s look at this another way: in Part 1, we have a quartet of characters, with John, Judith, Zebadiah, and Magdalene, and while the plot was moving at a mile a minute, we at least got some character growth, never mind interactions. In Part 2, Zebadiah is barely here, and I hope you weren’t invested in John and Judith’s romance, because I don’t think Judith has even a single line of dialogue here. Even John himself becomes somehow less of a character; not unlike Ishmael, who basically evaporates midway through Moby Dick, John takes a back seat as an active character while also giving us details on events he probably wouldn’t know about firsthand. When I finished Part 1, I was worried that the super-fast pacing of that first part would, at some point, result in the narrative having to stop dead in its tracks from sheer exhaustion, and my fears were proven right. Part 2 is far less entertaining, far less interesting, and ultimately feels less finished than what came before it.

You see, once John meets up with ~~his favorite weed dealer~~ a fellow member of the Cabal, his direct role in the narrative is basically over; he can sit back, relax, and watch the fireworks. Well, he does get to do one more thing, but I’ll save that for spoilers. Point being, the narrative turns mostly third-person from then on, and all the character stuff from Part 1 has been thrown at the window. Now, if Part 1 was about Our Hero™ getting introduced to the revolution, then Part 2 is about the revolution actually happening, and in this case the setup is better than the payoff. As it turns out, when you try to capture a whole goddamn socio-political movement from a first-person perspective, and in the span of as a short a novel as this one, you’re probably gonna lose something there, like basic fucking character. Heinlein would try this again much later with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and a good deal more successfully; that novel is a real chef’s kiss, in part because it’s mostly dialogue and not much action.

The Cabal, which John had theorized in Part 1 as being an ancient underground society with its own traditions, turns out to be just that. Indeed, the Cabal is all but said to have descended from the Freemasons, that old chestnut of conspiracy theories. Shocking, and yet not shocking at all, is the realization that the Cabal, while not having millions of people in its employ, is highly organized, to the point of having its own military.

The system of gigantic caverns called General Headquarters is located southeast of Phoenix, about thirty miles from the Mexican border. It had been in use for more than twenty years and had grown from a hideaway for fugitive brethren into a complete, modern military base. It had a dozen different entrances separated by miles of desert terrain, each entrance carefully concealed and protected by sensitive eye and ear devices and by automatic mines capable of destroying all trace of the tunnels that led to GHQ.

Even so, with hundreds of people in on this, and with some ex-military in the resistance, the Cabal would not be able to take on the Prophet’s forces in a one-on-one battle. As it turns out, this is only a mild inconvenience, but more on that later; admittedly the Cabal’s solution here is kind of ingenious. Anyway, we have the beginnings of an all-out war, or at least a curb stomp on a nationwide scale, but don’t get too excited since this is, after all, written from John’s now-ghostly perspective, after everything’s been said and done. Not very tense, is it? You could say The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress runs into this problem as well, but at least with that novel there’s a lot more to chew on other than the revolution itself. The worldbuilding so prevalent in Part 1 has now largely been put aside, in favor of action, except it’s action that’s not particularly appetizing to read, simply for the fact that John is now removed from it, and we’re given what amounts to half a novel’s worth of combat in about 15 pages. It’s very short, to the point of feeling emaciated.

There Be Spoilers Here

How does the Cabal plan to gather enough people to take on the Prophet? By tricking people across the country into thinking the Prophet sitting in New Jerusalem is an impostor, of course! The process of doing this is a bit convoluted in how it’s explained, and reading this is a post-Trump post-truth era definitely makes this all seem a little implausible, but I do like the idea of tricking people into thinking the fake Prophet is the real Prophet and vice versa. If only it were this easy to convince people to wear masks in HOSPITALS. I’m digressing, though. People across the country rebel against what they see as a false idol, indirectly doing the Cabal’s bidding while the Cabal itself is putting what troops it has into action. The way the revolution works out in this story feels weirdly truncated and multi-faceted at the same time, since it’s not so simple as the Cabal telling people the Prophet is a corrupt asshole and everyone just buying into it, but I also find it hard to believe people would get bamboozled by the Cabal this easily.

Aside from the revolution itself, there’s also the problem (which I suppose I should credit Heinlein for considering in the first place) of what to do about the millions of people who are loyal followers of the Prophet. This is where we get to a passage that really bothers me, and I guess it just goes to show that no matter where you land in Heinlein’s long and winding career you’re bound to find something that’s problematic. In this case it’s something so stupid and backwards on its face that even Heinlein himself, when he went back to revise If This Goes On— for Revolt in 2100 over a decade later, felt the need to rebut it. Get a load of this:

You can see that we had our work cut out for us, and that we did not dare hurry. More than a hundred million persons had to be examined to see if they could stand up under quick re-orientation, then re-examined after treatment to see if they had sufficiently readjusted. Until a man passed the second examination we could not afford to enfranchise him as a free citizen of a democratic state. We had to teach them to think for themselves, reject dogma, be suspicious of authority, tolerate difference of opinion, and make their own decisions—types of mental processes almost unknown in the United States for many generations.

Keep in mind that Heinlein, in 1939, was a flaming liberal, to the point where he was arguably a fellow traveler to the leftist movement of the period (he had worked on Upton Sinclair’s campaign for governor in 1934), so this is a bit jarring to see. Remember, however, that this is also pre-Maoist China, so it’s probably safe to assume that Heinlein was blissfully ignorant of the horrors that would necessarily come from re-education camps, not to mention the gross scale of the government apparatus required for such an effort. It’s uncomfortable to read now, given that to this day there’s a small but vocal portion of the American leftist population that thinks ~~concentration~~ re-education camps would be gosh darn neat. According to The World Beyond the Hill (as I’ve not read Revolt in 2100), Heinlein had evidently changed his mind on the whole brainwashing thing, inserting a bit character to decry the Cabal’s proposition of mass re-education.

It’s clear that Heinlein, regardless of when we find him, was always chiefly concerned with individual liberty—that the individual’s right to autonomy ought to be highly respected, and in this sense he was always philosophically libertarian. A problem that would always haunt Heinlein’s writing, though, is that his penchant for didacticism (and make no mistake, even some of his most disciplined works contain lectures) results in his actual beliefs getting shuffled with ideas he is merely putting forward for discussion. For instance, it should be clear to anyone with more than two brain cells that Heinlein is not actually advocating for ritual cannibalism in Stranger in a Strange Land, but it can be hard to tell at first since he throws in that devil’s-advocate argument with his genuine arguments for polyamory and nudism. Even with an early and well-rounded story like “The Roads Must Roll,” some people take that piece as anti-union, when it is in fact very much pro-union, being rather about corruption within what is otherwise a fine power structure. Some people, being sycophants, see even the most reasonable criticisms of unions as slander, but that’s their problem.

I’m digressing again. In all honesty I find Heinlein’s career far more interesting to talk about than Part 2 of If This Goes On—, and really I find this novella’s place in said career more interesting than the novella itself. There is one last thing I wanna bring up, though. There’s a question which probably no one asked up till now, but which is not necessarily a bad question: Why has John been writing all this? Well, another thing this story has in common with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is that the narrator also acts as an amateur historian; what we’ve been reading is actually a historical record about the revolution that John wrote after the fact. Oh, and he ends up with Judith, so there’s that. Another difference between the magazine version and the Revolt in 2100 version is that in the latter, John and Judith do not end up together, with John instead going with Magdalene at the end. Why not? It’s not like Judith had literally anything to do in the second half of the magazine verson. It’s just as well—maybe better—and hell, Heinlein may well have improved his story for book publication.

A Step Farther Out

I was worried that If This Goes On— was gonna let me down in its second half, and I’m sad to say it did, which is not to say it suddenly took a nosedive. There are some sprinkles of worldbuilding here that reminded me that Heinlein, impressively so for this early in his career, knew what he was doing with regards to mapping out what would become his Future History. The notion that the US, in a time not too far from ours, could fall to Christian fascism, is concerning and believable, and I was actually surprised by the more implied but still unmistakable notion that the generations of religious persecution which defined the country’s history would logically result in a Christian cult running the government—maybe not tomorrow, but perhaps a decade from now. We seem to be halfway there already. Heinlein was a supporter of religious freedom throughout his life, and while I do think the whole “the good Christians overthrow the bad Christians” thing is a bit of a copout, I can’t say it’s not plausible. That there aren’t any explicitly irreligious characters in the story is maybe more due to the social norms then being enforced in the magazine publishing business at the time.

I wouldn’t call If This Goes On— great by any means; it strikes me as too clunky, too lopsided in its pacing, and ultimately too conventional to be considered that. Upon rereading sections of The World Beyond the Hill (to refresh my memory), it now strikes me as unsurprising that Heinlein wrote “Requiem” after If This Goes On— and not before, given it feels like the work of an artist one step closer to perfecting his craft. Still, this is mandatory for Heinlein completionists, and even for those who just want a thorough understanding of how a master of the field got to where he was. I’m sure that without the great experiment of If This Goes On— we would not have gotten better long works from Heinlein in that first phase of his career, such as “Magic, Inc.” and “By His Bootstraps.” As such, it’s an important story, but not one I’m likely to read again.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “And Then There Were (N-One)” by Sarah Pinsker

September 3rd, 2022

(Cover by Julie Dillon. Uncanny, March/April 2017.)

Who Goes There?

Sarah Pinsker debuted in 2012 with her short story “Not Dying in Central Texas,” and ten years later she’s still going at it. She won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for her 2013 short story “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” and she would win her first Nebula in 2016 for “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Okay, now put a pin in that last one. Pinsker would win another Nebula for her debut novel A Song for a New Day, and her second novel, We Are Satellites, came out just last year from Berkley Books. If I sound a bit like an encyclopedia right now, it’s because unfortunately I’ve not read any of these. I know, I’m stupid. But better late than never! Her novella “And Then There Were (N-One)” was nominated for seemingly every award under the sun, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and so on. This is a weird and yet illuminating introduction to Pinsker, and I’ll explain why in a moment.

Pinsker is known to us as an SFF writer, but she’s also a productive musician, being part of the indie band Stalking Horses. My God, she’s a horse girl. As I’m writing this, her short story “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” is up for this year’s Hugo for Best Short Story, and given that it already won the Nebula its chances of also taking home the most famous award in the field are not low. I recommend checking out her website for updates and other things.

Placing Coordinates

“And Then There Were (N-One)” was first published online in the March/April 2017 issue of Uncanny Magazine. This issue also contains an interview with Pinsker which coincides with the story, and for the sake of convenience I’ll link it here as well. Now, if you’re like me, you’re wondering about where you can find this novella in book form; the good news is that we have a few options. Firstly there’s Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, and last I checked it’s still in print. There’s also Pinsker’s collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea, which also contains the aforementioned award-winning stories “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” and “Our Lady of the Open Road.” If you wanna play this reprint game on Hard Mode, may I suggest the bulky best-of anthology The Best of Uncanny? I say it’s Hard Mode because not only is it not in print, but it’s a limited edition set. That’s right, we’re looking at over $70 for this bad boy. Then again, you’re doing this book-only reprint thing more for collection’s sake than for just being able to read the story.

Enhancing Image

We start with Sarah Pinsker being invited to a convention. That’s right, the protagonist/narrator is Sarah Pinsker, though as we soon realize, she’s not our Sarah Pinsker. So, Sarah gets invited to SarahCon, a Comic Con or Worldcon-like affair being held on a secluded island off the coast of Canada, for reasons that’ll be explained later. SarahCon is a convention where all of the attendees are Sarah Pinskers from alternate universes. That’s right, this is a multiverse story; I can’t help but wonder what Pinsker would’ve done differently with the premise had she written it in 2022 and not 2016, given how much of a meme (to the point of being honestly tiresome) the whole multiverse thing has become since then. Naturally Sarah (the in-story Sarah) is skeptical about such an outlandish event, but her wife Mabel (who is apparently Pinsker’s wife IRL, more on that later) convinces her, and quickly enough we’re off to the races.

At SarahCon, Sarah finds alternate versions of herself by the dozens—some of them made most of the same choices she did, some are younger, some are older, many of them having different professions (there’s at least one Sarah who’s a rabbi), and yet conspicuously, none of these Sarahs are too different from each other. We never, for instance, get a “Sarah” who is actually a cis man, nor do we get an AMAB trans Sarah (I could be wrong), nor do we get any Sarahs who come from alternate universes whose timelines are radically different. Aside from diverging in a select number of events, all the Sarahs seem to come from recognizably the same United States and/or Canada. The biggest divergence, at least in terms of big-picture history, between the Sarahs is the fate of Seattle, which either turns out fine or gets wrecked to hell and back by a severe earthquake. We never get a Sarah who comes from a world that was conquered by Martians. Sad.

The list grouped us by surname first. Mine the most common, a trunk instead of a branch. I paged past, curious. Mostly Pinskers like myself. Made sense if we were the closest realities to the Pinsker who had invited us. There were other random surnames I chalked up to marriage. A full page of Sarah Sweetloves. I’d never really considered changing my name for anyone, even Mabel, but apparently others had.

After surname came city, divided evenly between Seattle, Toronto, and Baltimore, with a few outliers in Northampton, Somerville, Asheville, New York, Pretoria. After that came birthdate, occupation. The occupation list read like a collection of every “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’d ever answered. Geneticist, writer, therapeutic riding instructor, teacher, history professor, astronomer, journalist, dog trainer, barn manager. I was the only insurance investigator. In fairness, it had never exactly been on the greatest hits list.

We know the Sarah telling the story isn’t ours because she’s not an SFF writer, but an insurance investigator. I don’t know what the hell that means. Something that’s about as mysterious to me is the fictitious occupation of quantologist, though it’s all but said outright that quantology has to do with the study of alternate universes, and there’s a team of Sarahs at the con who are quantologists. It is worth mentioning again, albeit with different phrasing, that these Sarahs attending SarahCon have many traits in common, and we can gather from these shared traits what kind of person Pinsker—not to take shots at her or anything, of course, this is all in good fun. Aside from being a horse girl (the most Lovecraftian of girls), Pinsker is big on farm life generally; she’s also, unsurprisingly, big on writing in some form, be it fiction writing, songwriting, or screenwriting.

It’s possible that, much like communism, this is all a red herring, but digging into Pinsker’s background (which admittedly wasn’t a lot of digging) leads me to believe good chunks of the autobiographical info we get are actually autobiographical, though obviously there are a lot of non-facts that would belong to alternate Sarahs, including the narrator. The fun of reading “And Then There Were (N-One)” is mostly two-pronged: we get a meta story (though it’s not as meta as it at first appears) about the author herself taking up about 95% of the cast, as well as a fictional depiction of a con, and don’t we love those? I find the first half of the story the most enjoyable simply because there’s basically no urgency; we’re allowed to take in the ridiculousness of the situation and Sarah gets to have some slice-of-life conversations with other Sarahs (whom she names depending on physical differences about them, like a Sarah wearing a No Good Deeds band shirt being called No Good Deeds).

Oh, and there are references to SFF culture, because of course there are, though since Narrator!Sarah is not into SFF herself, the references are not too obvious. It’s not like we’re being subjected to cries of “Aha yes, I too am a woman of culture,” but I have to admit these things did often get this reaction out of me.

Concerns assuaged, I dumped my backpack’s contents onto the table and repacked the stuff I wanted to carry with me for the evening, then flopped onto the bed to read the program. It contained a basic explanation of the multiverse theory, a welcome note, a sponsor page, a thank you page, a map, and “Fun Statistics!” based on the questionnaires we’d filled out prior to arriving. Ninety two percent of us played instruments. Five percent of us owned horses, thirteen percent owned cats, eighty percent owned dogs. One person lived in a world where dogs had been rendered extinct by a virus. So much for fun.

Is that last part a reference to Connie Willis’s novella “The Last of the Winnebagos”? I’ve got my eye on you, Sarah.

“And There Were (N-One)” is definitely a novella, clocking in at 23,786 words; even so, it feels more like a novelette than a proper novella, which is far from a bad thing. It’s an undemanding read, both because the plot only really demands half the story’s length and also because Narrator!Sarah is a very likable and readable protagonist. First-person narratives, at their best, often (not always) feel like we’re getting to know the narrator on a personal level, and ultimately I did end up wondering how much Narrator!Sarah and our Sarah diverge, since I felt like I was getting to know Pinsker as a person to an extent. On the one hand I hope she doesn’t check out this review, but I also want her to know that I think she’s quite the wordsmith—not in terms of crafting complicated sentences or coming up with delightful metaphors, but rather in keeping the reader thoroughly engaged. Her inventiveness combined with her colloquialism reminds me of John Varley, or at least early Varley. The title is clearly referencing Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, but tonally I was far more reminded of one of my favorite Varley stories, “The Phantom of Kansas.”

Which reminds me—this is a murder mystery.

There Be Spoilers Here

Narrator!Sarah investigates a disturbance in the nightclub area of the building and finds a corpse, and not just any corpse: one of the Sarah quantologists, or so it seems. The death is reported, and soon Sarah discovers firsthand that the death could not have been natural, and likely was not accidental, for the back of the dead Sarah’s head must’ve been hit with some kind of blunt instrument. There’s no policewoman or private detective among the crowd, and due to a storm coming in, authorities won’t be able to arrive until later. Since Narrator!Sarah is an insurance investigator she’s the closest thing they’ve got to figuring out whodunnit. Aside from being an Agatha Christie reference, the title is the way it is because there’s only one victim, and we don’t know the number of Sarahs attending SarahCon, hence N – One. Finding a motive proves difficult, since the workers at the hotel (who are not Sarahs themselves, mind you) don’t have any conceivable motive to kill one of the attendees, and Narrator!Sarah has a hard time imagining herself as a killer.

So, motive, and also the method. When looking for possible murder weapons our improvised sleuth goes through some items held for presentation at a Show & Tell section (which is just cute), and we get something we know our Sarah would have: the Nebula Award.

As I touched the award, I felt a strange certainty this was it. That if I were to murder someone, which I absolutely wouldn’t do, this would be the weapon of choice. Not the mic stands, not the chairs, not the turntable case: this glittering block that would travel back to another reality at the end of the weekend with its owner none the wiser. I shuddered and shook the thought off.

To be fair, you could very feasibly kill someone with one of those.

Now, the question as to who killed the quantologist is really not hard to solve, though there are a couple twists. For one thing, the quantologist who had her head bashed in is not in fact a quantologist—she’s the DJ who was set to play at the nightclub. Somebody had swapped clothes with her while nobody was looking. But why? Another easy answer when you think about it. The Sarahs at SarahCon are mostly similar, if not almost the exact same. Suppose, however, that one Sarah who knew about the background of another Sarah saw her as a good target to swap places with? Suppose a Sarah who has had a shitty life mostly due to circumstance were to swap with a Sarah who had mostly screwed her own life up? The Seattle earthquake is a big divergence point, and also a plausible motive; you’d have a Sarah who lost loved ones in the earthquake swapping with someone who came from an alternate universe where Seattle didn’t suffer that natural disaster.

You also have Sarahs who are with Mabel and those who aren’t; a surprisingly large portion of the Sarahs are with Mabel. Which, okay, fine. Personally I find it hard to believe, just because you could sneeze and probably end up with a different person, but it’s not like this is a story which calls for realism or even plausibility. While Narrator!Sarah finding the killer hinges on the Sarahs differing in mostly subtle ways, as opposed to massive differences, I can’t help but feel like Pinsker willfully ignored the opportunity to go totally bonkers with the idea. I also can’t help but feel like the ending is a bit of a copout, even though I understand why thematically it makes sense. It’s sort of an open ending; we don’t know if Narrator!Sarah will turn in the killer/impostor. There are, of course, at least two choices Narrator!Sarah could make here that would then (theoretically, anyway) result in two different Sarahs, and so on and so on, and she openly recognizes this.

I guess what I’m saying is that the sequence of events with the murder mystery is logical in itself, but it’s hindered by maybe being too logical. Of the novella’s 23,000+ words, it seems like relatively few are actually spent on solving the mystery, and that’s because the mystery is by no means complicated, nor is it the most gripping part of the narrative. If anything I wish we’d spent a few thousand more words exploring the many possibilities of the convention, having some fun with the many Sarahs, maybe get in on a panel (there’s apparently one on gender, but we don’t get to hear anything about it). Of course, having it turn into a wacky slice of life would require basically writing a different story altogether, and I do like very much what I like about it.

A Step Farther Out

There’s a plot-important reason for why the Sarahs at the SarahCon are all so similar when you get down to it, but I can’t help but feel like Pinsker held herself back from having more fun with what is (let’s face it) an inherently silly premise. Like why not go nuts with it? It’s possible, of course, that Everything Everywhere All At Once spoiled me on the whole multiverse thing, since that movie basically takes it to the logical extreme, but what if there was a different Sarah Pinsker who made the decision to turn “And then There Were (N-One)” into an outright comedy? Though conversely there would also be a Sarah Pinsker who made it more serious, which is such a horrid idea I dare not think it. I’m honestly surprised this didn’t get the Hugo, because it seems like exactly the kind of story Hugo voters (i.e., Worldcon attendees) would latch onto, but I’m also saying this because it’s quite a fun read. Pinsker may not make 100% use of her premise, but this is something that could easily devolve into bullshit.

The decision to have Narrator!Sarah not be our Sarah is a key one; first off, I imagine it was a challenge (albeit a fun challenge) to devise a version of yourself who is much the same as yourself, but different in ways that are often subtle. I’m reminded of Lunar Park, in which Bret Easton Ellis is both author and protagonist, but past some initial biographical similarities Ellis the narrator turns out to be a decidedly different person from Ellis the author. Another key decision is that while it’s implied our Sarah is one of the many attendees at SarahCon, we never run into her—at least not as far as we can tell. There are enough degrees of separation to keep the self-reflexive aspect while also not coming off as a painful self-insert. Yes, it’s solipsistic just by virtue of its existence, but it doesn’t turn into the author patting themselves on the back (okay, there’s a little back-patting, but I’ll let it slide), and hell, Pinsker knows what she’s doing. I guess that’s the highest praise I can give this novella, aside from its entertainment value: Pinsker knows what she’s doing.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: September 2022

September 1st, 2022
(Cover by Larry Elmore. Amazing Stories, March 1985.)

Picking material to review for this month has been way more agonizing than I expected. Whereas I had August’s lineup nailed down fairly early on, I kept switching things around for September until just a couple days ago. I’m posting every few days, and I’m all but guaranteed to cover at least one whole serial each month, but consider how much SFF has been published in the past century. I started this blog with magazine publication as the main criterion for selecting stories because I thought it’d be a useful enough funnel, but as it turns out, there’s too much to go around! So many stories worth checking out by so many authors across such a long span of time, and I can only review this many per month?

Yet I’m nothing if not persistent, and also dumb.

We have a serial to finish this month, plus a whole new one. I try to find stuff from other magazines, but the truth is that Astounding was the king of serials from the mid-’30s until around the time its name was changed to Analog, and even then it tended to run the most noteworthy serials in a given year. To compensate, we have short fiction which is very much not from Astounding/Analog, and with one exception (you’ll soon see), I’ve not read any of these before. These are totally new experiences to me. There’s the possibility that I won’t like them, which I hope won’t be the case. The point of this blog is to dive into works by the notable minds of SFF, some famous, many forgotten, and see if maybe we can get at the heart of these things, be they from half a century ago or just last week.

Now, time for the serials:
1. If This Goes On— by Robert Heinlein. Published in two parts in Astounding Science Fiction, February to March 1940. We read Part 1 last month, and now we’re finally finishing this. Will I ultimately think Heinlein’s early novella was worthy of its Retro Hugo win, or will I think it’s merely decent? Stay tuned.
2. The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson. Published in three parts in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1938. Despite what its title might tell you this is not part of Williamson’s Legion of Space series, but is a standalone short novel. I really like Williamson’s “With Folded Hands…” as well as his werewolf novella “Darker Than You Think,” so I wanna see how he does in a longer mode.
Now for the novellas. We have two this month, like in August (only being able to review two novellas makes me weep inside), and one is a certified classic while the other is looking to become a modern classic:
1. “And Then There (N-One)” by Sarah Pinsker. First published in the March/April 2017 issue of Uncanny Magazine. The SFF novella has, in recent years, mostly been banished from the ‘zines, as online magazines aren’t keen on printing novellas, but Uncanny is an exception. Sarah Pinsker is very much alive and well, though sadly I’ve not read anything by her before. I hope she doesn’t mind if I stumble into this one blindly, but if what I’ve been hearing about her award-nominated novella is accurate at all then I have nothing to fear!
2. “The Star-Pit” by Samuel R. Delany. First published in the February 1967 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. I try not to gush about authors I love from the outset, but I think Delany is one of the best to ever do it. Babel-17? Classic. Nova? Classic. Dhalgren? One of my all-time favorites. And Delany could be as vigorous a short fiction writer as he is a novelist, as short stories like “Driftglass” and “Corona” prove. I’ve read “The Star-Pit” before and I’ll gladly read it again. Delany is an artist of alarming brilliance, and his work demands close attention.
Finally, the short stories:
1. “The Blind Minotaur” by Michael Swanwick. Published in the March 1985 issue of Amazing Stories. Yes, Amazing Stories was still around in the ’80s, and was still releasing some damn good stuff. Swanwick himself debuted in 1980, so he could be considered a bit of an old-timer, but there’s nothing old-hat about this man, for his fiction is often vigorous, intellectual, entertaining, and even mystical at times. His 1991 novel Stations of the Tide recently became one of my favorites, and yet I look forward to reading more of his many short stories.
2. “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear. Published in the March 2008 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Elizabeth Bear is one of the great practitioners of SFF to have come about in the past two decades, showing herself to be equally adept at both long and short form, as well as fantasy and science fiction (with a touch of horror mayhaps). She won back-to-back Hugos for her short stories “Tideline” (which I’ve read before) and the story that I’ve selected to cover this month (which I have not). Her graciousness knows no bounds.
I’ve decided to stick more with contemporary voices for September; of the six authors mentioned, four are still with us and active in the field to some extent. Delany has not written SFF with regularity in many years now, his work in academia has been immense, and recent lectures and interviews have show that his great mind has not withered even one bit. I must confess that part of my wants to always dig myself a hole and barracade myself with works by authors I already like, with authors I’m already familiar with, but we have one author here (Pinsker) whom I’ve not read anything by before, and I gotta say, I’m excited. Few things are more invigorating than potentially discovering a new favorite author, especially one who’s still currently making their way through the field.

Now you might be thinking, do I have anything special in mind for October? Why yes, I do. Halloween is my favorite holiday by a country mile and I intend to go all-out with it, but we’ll just have to wait for that.

Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “With Morning Comes Mistfall” by George R. R. Martin

August 31st, 2022

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Analog, May 1973.)

Who Goes There?

Indeed who. George R. R. Martin is one of the most famous authors in the world today; even people who don’t read books at all (the poor devils) probably recognize him. In 1996 he began the series that would make him a household name, the A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, a landmark title in low fantasy with five books so far and a sixth coming out… at some point. On top of being famous, Martin has also become infamous for, among other things, seemingly refusing to release the last two volumes of his series, and while Martin obviously isn’t obligated to finish his work for anyone else’s sake, one can’t help but get a sense that there’s a cynical motive at play here. Regardless, unless something disastrous happens—like, say, Martin coming out as a rabid homophobe or transphobe—this man’s legacy is more or less settled.

There’s just one problem, though: it’s not.

Martin’s uber-success with A Song of Ice and Fire has had the perverse effect of all but burying the fact that he was one of the most promising writers of science fiction to debut in the ’70s. Hitting the professional scene with “The Hero” in 1971, Martin would be nominated for the inaugural ~~John W. Campbell~~ Astounding Award for Best New Writer, losing to Jerry Pournelle, and the nomination was well-earned! By 1973 he showed himself to be a lyrical and emotional earnest author, not letting hard science get in the way of strong character writing and evocative imagery. “With Morning Comes Mistfall” was, according to the Thousand Worlds fandom wiki (more on that in a bit), written in the summer of 1971 before being published in the May 1973 issue of Analog Science Fiction. Despite appearing at first to be just another short story, “With Morning Comes Mistfall” would go on to earn Martin his first Hugo and Nebula nominations, and as we’re about to see those nominations are very much earned.

Now, ISFDB lists “If Morning Comes Mistfall” as a standalone story, which it functionally is. However, the aforementioned Thousand Worlds fandom wiki has an article on the story, listing it as part of that shared continuity. Does it make a difference if it’s part of the Thousand Worlds series? Not really. I just think it’s funny whenever the people who run ISFDB disagree with somebody. Get a load of this:

The Thousand Worlds wiki lists this as part of that series, although by their own admission it is “only a tenuous link” based on a planet name also referenced in a different story in that series.

You don’t see that kind of note on ISFDB a lot.

Placing Coordinates

This issue of Analog is…… NOT on the Archive.

I know, I’m sorry! If you want it you’re gonna have to get a used copy the old-fashioned way. I guess there’s also Luminist, but I don’t find their layout to be as intuitive, you can’t view an issue in-browser, and most importantly… their PDFs tend to be HUGE. Like we’re talking 100 megabytes or bigger, so big that you can’t even preview the file you’re about to download. It’s like I’ve entered an alternate timeline where file compression isn’t a thing.

On the bright side, it’s not like “With Morning Comes Mistfall” has only been reprinted two times. It showed up in the collection A Song for Lya, which covers a good deal of Martin’s ’70s output, and of course it appeared in some anthologies from that period, such as the third volume of Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year. If you want a recent reprint, and assuming you don’t mind putting in a few more dollars, we have the first volume of Dreamsongs, which covers most of the material in A Song for Lya as well as additional stories.

Enhancing Image

Normally I don’t pay mind to story blurbs, but this one (not sure if it was written by Martin or editor Ben Bova) caught my attention:

Man’s curiosity drives him to seek the answer to every question. But it’s the unanswered questions which are the most exciting.

It’s about as succinct a mission statement as you can get, all while giving absolutely none of the plot away. Not that there’s much of a plot to begin with. “With Morning Comes Mistfall” is a hard story to spoil because it’s far more driven by characters and themes than by the movements of its narrative, which themselves are not hard to anticipate. It’s a very simple story, but it’s also Campbellian in the best way possible, in the sense that implies the existence of something great that was previously outside the realm of human knowledge; you could call it secular mysticism. “With Morning Comes Mistfall” could have very feasibly been printed in Campbell’s Analog, and this seems to be the mode in which Martin wrote his eariest professional-grade fiction. The result is a story which lacks characteristics we would now associate with Martin; there’s no foul language, nothing too violent happens, and female characters aren’t being forced into sexually degrading situations.

But more on that later.

With all that said, I’ll try my best to give you something of a plot summary, and for better or worse, the spoiler section will be pretty short this time around. So…

A journalist travels to the desolate planet of Wraithworld, a planet that remains almost entirely uninhabited. There’s only one human establishment on the whole planet, that being Castle Cloud, a hotel and casino owned by Paul Sanders. The journalist has come to talk to Sanders about the wraiths, a supposed mythical species lurking the depths of the mist-covered landscape. Nobody has ever gotten concrete evidence that that wraiths exist, but much like Bigfoot or the Jersey Devil, their mysteriousness makes them a magnet for tourism; while the sights of Wraithworld are nothing to sneeze at, people largely come for the wraiths. What I’m trying to say is that this story is about cryptids, which immediately makes it up my alley.

Sanders is a bit of a subversive character; despite being a business owner, and being described physically as rather rotund (something often attributed stereotypically to greedy businessmen), Sanders turns out to not be of that sort. The journalist quickly finds that Sanders is indeed taken by the mysterious beauty of Wraithworld. When the journalist notes the rising of the mists over the mountain range (Castle Cloud was built on the highest peak), we get this:

“Is it always like this?” I asked Sanders, after drinking it all in for a while.

“Every mistfall,” he replied, turning toward me with a wistful smile. He was a fat man, with a jovial red face. Not the sort who should smile wistfully. But he did.

He gestured toward the east, where Wraithworld’s sun rising above the mists made a crimson and orange spectacle of the dawn sky.

“The sun,” he said. “As it rises, the heat drives the mists back into the valleys, forces them to surrender the mountains they’ve conquered during the night. The mists sink, and one by one the peaks come into view. By noon the whole range is visible for miles and miles. There’s nothing like it on Earth, or anywhere else.”

The conflict comes in when Charles Dubowski, a renowned scienist, comes to Castle Cloud, and he too is here for the wraiths. More specifically Dubowski is here with a team to scan as far and as thoroughly as they can to see if the wraiths are real or a fabrication. We’re presented with a triangle of conflict—two sides ideologically opposed with a third as the more or less neutral presence. Dubowski wants to disprove the existence of the wraiths while Sanders wants to keep the wraiths’ existence ambiguous. Does it hurt that Sanders profits immensely off of people coming to Wraithworld to see if they can spot any wraiths? Of course not, but that’s not the point. It’s worth mentioning too that while Dubowski is written less sympathetically, he’s by no measn evil; his worldview simply conflicts with Sanders’s, whom the journalist takes more of a liking to.

Now, something that caught my eye reading the story this time around is the fact that not only is the journalist (who’s also the first-person narrator) nameless, but also genderless. There are only three principal characters in this thing and two of them are confirmed dudes, yet there’s nothing to indicate one way or another what gender the narrator is. This might be for the best. Personally I like to think the narrator is a woman, but I assume Martin wrote this voice with a man in mind. Otherwise there aren’t any female characters of any importance, which hey, it’s not like there’s any in-your-face sexism around here. I also like that the journalist, who’s a relatively passive character, is the narrator, since it focuses the action on the war of worldviews between Sanders and Dubowski.

We get to find out some more about Wraithworld, a setting which Martin chooses not to describe in excessive detail. That the narrator is a journalist (as was Martin before he got into writing SFF) helps explain the perfunctory style; we aren’t burdened with learning about anything that we don’t have to. We know Wraithworld is a failed colony. We know there was something called the Gregor expedition, in which some explorers were driven to madness, claiming they had come into contact with tall apelike creatures that were immune to bullets. There were a few deaths, and there’ve been more since then, often assumed to be due to the wraiths. What began as an anomaly soon turned into myth.

And the legend of the mist wraiths was born, and began to grow. Other ships came to Wraithworld, and a trickle of colonists came and went, and Paul Sanders landed one day and erected the Castle Cloud so the public might safely visit the mysterious planet of the wraiths.

Not that Wraithworld has much else going for it. The mists cover everything below the tops of the highest mountains by nightfall, and the soil is not good for farming. As a colony, Wraithworld’s potential would be pretty low. On the plus side, the air seems to be breathable; we never get an in-depth explanation for the world’s climate, but the atmosphere’s mix and density must be Earthlike enough for people to walk around without space suits. All the better. Martin doesn’t bog the story down with details that might distract us from what is ultimately a fable or a mood piece, and what a tightly structured fable it is. That the ending is easily predictable is a non-issue, since in order for Martin’s thesis to work, the story must end in a certain way.

There Be Spoilers Here

After accompanying Dubowski and his men through the forests and mountains in search of the wraiths, the journalist gets the creeping feeling that Dubowski is right, that the wraiths were a product of hysteria—a hunch that turns out to be correct. Shortly before Dubowski is about to give a press conference about his findings, he lets Sanders and the journalist in on the conclusion of his research: the wraiths aren’t real. They didn’t find any, no matter how much manpower and tech they used. Sanders is not a happy man as he tries, with hope fading, to convince Dubowski that there might be wraiths in the mists after all.

Sanders raised his eyes from his drink. They were bitter eyes. “Gregor,” he said stubbornly. “Gregor and the other classics.”

Dubowski’s smile became a smirk. “Ah, yes. We searched that area quite thoroughly. My theory was right. We found a tribe of apes nearby. Big brutes. Like giant baboons, with dirty white fur. Not a very successful species, either. We found only one small tribe, and they were dying out. But clearly, that was what Gregor’s man sighted. And exaggerated all out of proportion.”

The discovery ruins Sanders’s business, of course. People no longer come to Wraithworld looking for wraiths. It does, on the other hand, take off as a colony, albeit a minor one. More people come to the planet, but all three main characters go their separate ways, with the journalist leaving to cover other events, Dubowski continuing his studies elsewhere, and Sanders leaving Castle Cloud to be condemned; we never find out what becomes of him, ultimately. It’s a somber ending, but it’s not the end of the world by any means, as the journalist comes to find. Normally I don’t like to quote the endings of stories, but I have to do it with this one—I think it’s too lovely. The yearning in these final words is palpable.

“Otherwise the planet hasn’t changed much. The mists still rise at sunset, and fall at dawn. The Red Ghost is still stark and beautiful in the early morning light. The forests are still there, and the rockcats still prowl.

Only the wraiths are missing.

Only the wraiths.

Gets my emotions going, even more so the second time around. Martin knows what the perfect note to end on is and he goes with it. Like everything else it feels like the act of an artist who is totally in control of his faculties, and I just adore it.

A Step Farther Out

This is a very different kind of writing from Martin than what most people are used to. It’s poetic, but not over-encumbered with purple language. It’s retrained, coming in at about fifteen pages, exhibiting a very young writer (Martin would’ve only been 22 when he wrote it) who’s also trying his utmost to be disciplined with his craft. Apparently Martin wrote “With Morning Comes Mistfall” shortly before another great early outing of his, “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” though the latter would be published first. I would not have guessed, since while “The Second Kind of Loneliness” certainly does hone in on the mood it wants, the slightly older story here feels more like the work of a mature writer. On top of that, Martin comes through with a discernable statement here, about the nature of beauty and about a certain quality that something beautiful should ideally have—that is to say, an air of mystery about it.

Despite Paul Sanders being a bsuiness type, Martin clearly sympathizes with him because, in the context of the story, Sanders is also an artist, with Wraithworld as his piece or perhaps his muse. That Sanders never comes to understand totally how this planet works, and that we the readers are denied a lot of details (What does a rockcat look like, anyway?), reinforces this notion that in order for something to bewitch us with what seems to be an unspeakable beauty, we can only know so much about it. Indeed, there are things about a thing of beauty that we shouldn’t know; too much knowledge would take away the mystery of it, and after all, the most mysterious things are also the most alluring.

I think “With Morning Comes Mistfall” is Martin’s early masterpiece; it’s certainly the best of his ’70s output that I’ve read so far, or at least it’s my favorite of the bunch. It lost the Hugo that year to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and the Nebula to James Tiptree Jr.’s “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death.” Now that’s some pretty intimidating competition right there! “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a stone-cold classic, one that’s still being much read and talked about today (God forbid if you’re forced to have a classroom discussion about it), and undeniably it’s more layered than Martin’s story. Still, if we’re talking about pure enjoyability in the act of reading a story, about reading something perfectly simple and yet poignant, about catching a young writer at the very moment when he becomes a serious artist, then I would have voted for Martin.

See you next time.
Serial Review: If This Goes On— by Robert Heinlein (Part 1/2)

August 27th, 2022

(Cover by Hubert Rogers. Astounding, February 1940.)

Who Goes There?

Robert Heinlein doesn’t need an introduction, but I’ll write one anyway. Heinlein was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to writing SF; his first story, “Life-Line,” was published when he was already in his 30s, but whereas some authors spend several years doing apprentice work, Heinlein’s apprenticeship phase was virtually nonexistent. While “Life-Line” is by no means Heinlein’s best, it exhibits an inventiveness and economy of style that would quickly define his writing, and in the January 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction we got “Requiem,” his first great story. Heinlein’s rise to prominence possessed a swiftness which few authors in the genre’s whole history can come even close to matching, and despite having been active for only a couple years, he was chosen as the Guest of Honor for the 1941 Worldcon, held in Denver that year.

What else? He would go on to win four Hugos for Best Novel (a record only matched so far by Lois McMaster Bujold), and he also has several Retro Hugo wins under his belt, including one for If This Goes On—. Evidently Heinlein continues to be a favorite with SF fandom, and nearly all of his works remain in print. He also continues to be immensely controversial. Heinlein’s views on many subjects changed radically over the course of his life, and while he was a New Deal Democrat during the first phase of his career (1939 to 1942), by the ’60s he had become something like a Goldwater Republican. Some views Heinlein held remained consistent, though; for one, he seemed to be pro-military from the start (not surprising, given his time in the Navy), and yet he also seemed to believe in the virtues of the nudist lifestyle, as well as plural marriage (the word “polyamory” had not yet been coined in Heinlein’s lifetime, though some of his fiction unequivocally endorses it). With Heinlein there is at least something to enjoy regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum—and conversely, there’s always something to reject.

If This Goes On— was Heinlein’s fourth published story, coming right after “Requiem,” and it was also his longest up to that point, having to be serialized in two parts. By February 1940, Astounding Science Fiction had become without question the top SF magazine in the field, with its sister magazine Unknown also donning the crown for fantasy; by this time, John W. Campbell had mostly established his stable of writers—mostly men in their 20s, with a few holdovers from the previous era like Clifford D. Simak and Jack Williamson. There were quite a few talented authors writing regularly for Astounding, but Heinlein soon became Campbell’s favorite of the bunch, and it only takes a reading of If This Goes On— to see why.

Placing Coordinates

While Heinlein’s novels remain readily in print (with maybe one or two exceptions), the same can’t be said for his short fiction. If This Goes On— has the awkward position of being far too long to be called a short story, yet not quite long enough to count as a full novel; call it a long novella. Sad thing about novella reprints is that novella-oriented anthologies are a super-niche subspecies of something that’s already pretty niche—a shame, considering SF is often at its best at novella length (imo). It has appeared mostly in two collections, both of which seem to have fallen out of print lately, though I can’t imagine they’re hard to find used: Revolt in 2100 and The Past Through Tomorrow. Thnakfully the February 1940 issue of Astounding is on the Archive. Did you know that this issue also contains Leigh Brackett’s debut story, “Martian Quest”?

Enhancing Image

Rather than being set on an alien planet, If This Goes On— takes place in a future United States, where democracy has died and been replaced with a kind of Christian fascism wherein the ruler of the country is also the so-called Prophet Incarnate. I’m so glad we don’t have to worry about this happening in the real world. The story follows John Lyle, a junior member of a section of this future military called the Angels of the Lord, and during one of his routine night watches he thinks about the ~~painfully obvious~~ subtly growing corruption within the system he was born and raised to respect.

I sighed and returned to my lonely vigil. I mused glumly on the difference between life here in New Jerusalem and life as I had envisioned it when I was a cadet. The Palace and Temple were shot through and through with intrigue and politics, I was forced to admit. Where now, was the proud and altruistic motto of the service: “Non Sibi, Sed Dei?” I knew, too well, that the priests and deacons, ministers of state, and Palace functionaries all appeared engaged in a scramble for power and favor at the hand of the Prophet. Even the officers of my own corps, the Angels of the Lord, seemed corrupted by it.

Whereas protagonists in dystopian narratives tend to be loyal members who are convinced to join the other side through some violent revelation, John was already becoming skeptical about the government he worked for. We don’t get much backstory for John, outside of his military training, but we do get, in a remarkably short amount of time, a good deal of backstory as to the workings of the novella’s setting. If This Goes On— was not the first story to form part of Heinlein’s Future History, but it was the most ambitious entry up to that point, and it was the first to send everyone the message that Heinlein wasn’t fucking with his worldbuilding. In order to understand what makes If This Goes On— special, you have to also understand that nobody was concocting what we’d now call a future history at this time; while there were series, and stories set in the same continuity, nobody was mapping out a fictional timeline like Heinlein did.

Something that this novella does which is very much in line with other dystopian narratives, though, is that the (always male) hero starts to change his mind because he sees even the smallest opportunity to get some PUSSY; in this case it’s Judith, one of the Prophet’s Virgins (a Virgin being a nun, possibly also a sex slave). John talks with Judith while on his watch for literally five minutes and he can’t keep his mind off her for the rest of Part 1—his cock is just hard as a fucking statue the whole time. In fairness to the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet love story that unfolds, John and Judith are in positions where they are basically prohibited from interacting with the opposite sex beyond the absolute necessities. While the Angels of the Lord are not strictly celibate, becoming a volcel means you’re more likely to get promoted, and of course Judith is not supposed to fuck around at all. Now, while we’re never told this, it is rather heavily implied that the Prophet gives Virgins the Harvey Weinstein treatment, hence Judith’s own disillusionment with the government.

We then witness what may be the fastest turnaround in the history of fiction; in about ten pages, John decides that he’s had enough of being a dog of the military, and it doesn’t take long at all for him to rope in his friend and comrade Zebadiah, though it turns out Zeb knows more than he lets on anyway. In the span of a dozen pages we’re introduced to a vast and unfamiliar future society, a well-thought-out system of government, a military hierarchy, a conspiracy, and quite a bit of action. The thing I realized reading If This Goes On— is that this story has the unique problem of being actually too fast; it feels less like a proper short novel and feels more like a compressed novel, with Heinlein simultaneously overwhelming us with details while also omitting anything that could be considered fat. The result is a narrative which is almost packed more with sketches of scenes than scenes proper, and I have to suspect John is a first-person narrator so Heinlein wouldn’t have to worry himself with multiple perspectives.

We hear about something called the Cabal very early on, and if you have even the slightest idea where this is going then you know that the Cabal—an alleged underground movement working to undermine the Prophet—is a real thing after all. What happens after John joines the Cabal is something I’m saving for the spoiler section, but needless to say we get quickly wrapped up in a festering underground movement which seeks to expose the Prophet as a fraud. John now not only has to work with the rebels, but keep Judith as well as evade authorities himself, since by this point he has become a fugitive. Like I said, this all happens in pretty much the blink of an eye, yet despite my reservations about the pacing, it says something of Heinlein’s talent that his mixing of action and exposition never left me confused. Most authors, especially circa 1940, would’ve spent whole pages explaining the inner workings of this future theocracry, not to mention the futuristic technology (not that there’s a lot of that here), but Heinlein keeps exposition quick and mostly passive; he’s a wizard at this sort of thing.

There Be Spoilers Here

Things get more interesting once John enters the Cabal, although we don’t get much in the way of what becoming a new member is like. I suspect Heinlein made John a first-person narrator because he doesn’t wanna deal with subplots involving different characters, but also because with John recounting his own experiences, he can skim over them if he doesn’t feel like going into dirty details with his audience. Take the following passages, for instance, which compresses potentially a whole chapter of material into one paragraph:

It is not necessary, nor desirable, that I record here the rest of my instruction as a newly-entered brother. Suffice to say that the instruction was long, and of solemn beauty, and there was nowhere in it any trace of the macabre and blasphemous devil-worship that common gossip alleged. It was filled with reverence for God, brotherly love, and uprightness, and included instruction in the principles of an ancient and honorable profession and the symbolic meanings of the working tools of that profession.

Heinlein also wants us to know that while the Prophet is totally a sham, Christianity itself gets a pass. Now, I’m not sure how much of this was due to beliefs held at the time and how much was due to Campbell being squeamish about a plot where a Christian theocracy is depicted as evil, though it must be said that Heinlein and Campbell were not Christians. I have to assume this was done because at the time many readers were, while not outwardly religious, churchgoing folks; still, the idea that “reasonable” Christians like John would want to rebel against a corrupt government that uses the Gospels as a shield is not implausible. Indeed, what helps coax John into joining the Cabal is the notion that these rebels are themselves quite religious.

With Judith being spirited away to Mexico (they deliberated over whether she should flee to Mexico or Canada, and decided correctly that the latter was too horrible), and with John having abandoned his post, our hero now much take on an alternate identity. Up to this point in this story, we haven’t gotten much in the way of futuristic technology, but things take a turn when John has to take on someone else’s personality—literally. The higher-ups bring a short list of people matching closely enough with John physically who are in the unique position of being physically but not legally dead. John Lyle becomes Adam Reeves, a textiles salesman, and how the Cabal surgeon—sorry, metamorphist—is able to change John to resemble Adam is really something.

The most difficult thing in matching him physically, and the last to be applied, was artificial fingerprints. An opaque, flesh-colored plastic was painted on my fingers, then my fingers were sealed into molds made from Reeves’ fingers. It was delicate work and hard to get a satisfactory result. One finger was done over seven times before the metamorphist would pass it.

Hair, nose, ears, eyes, even fingerprints. John effectively becomes Adam, and for a while he works well as a doppelganger. We do come to find, though, that there is one area the Cabal could not have possibly accounted for, and which sends John fleeing once againat the end of Part 1: blood type. How will John get out of this debacle? Will he reunite with Judith? Will the Cabal succeed in overthrowing the Prophet? Stay tuned.

A Step Farther Out

There are SF stories from the late ’30s and early ’40s that I enjoy more than If This Goes On—, or at least the first half of it. As sentimental as it is, I find “Requiem” to be the more emotionally resonant and structually balanced story, but then we’re talking about a short story compared to something a good deal more ambitious. It only makes sense, I suppose, that a story about revolution should itself be revolutionary; this was the moment Heinlein went from a promising newbie to one of the big names in the field, and he had been active for less than a year at that point. This is not the Heinlein of much longer and more ungainly works like Stranger in a Strange Land, but the young Heinlein, the disciplined Heinlein, the fast-witted Heinlein. That If This Goes On— now reads as fairly predictable speaks more of its influence than its innate quality. We’ve gotten some pretty vast and complicated future histories post-Heinlein (Poul Anderson comes to mind), but Heinlein was the first to do it.

I’m sure when people read this thing when it was first being serialized they were glued to their seats, but from a modern perspective I more often found myself dissecting Heinlein’s methods, seeing how they worked, and how he managed to dish out (not always perfectly, it must be said) so much exposition with so few words without it being confusing. It helps, of course, that we don’t get what would later become pervasive Heinlein-isms here; John is not a perpetual wisecracker, Judith isn’t constantly thinking about making babies, the infodumps are shockingly constrained compared to what we’d get much later. I guess the biggest complaint I have is that when I finished Part 1 I was thinking less “I wonder what happens next” and more “Hmm, that’s interesting. Old-timey SF tends to be fast-paced, but this takes such quickness to at times ridiculous extremes. Will it get worse in Part 2, or will things slow down a bit and we get to learn more about this dystopian future United States?

See you next time.
Novella Review: “The Lineman” by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

August 24th, 2022

(Cover by Barry Waldman. F&SF, August 1957.)

Who Goes There?

Walter M. Miller, Jr. is, along with Daniel Keyes and Tom Godwin, probably the most famous one-story author in the history of SF—in the sense that he is basically only known for one story, that is. The reality is that before he started writing the novellas that he would later revise and conjoin to form A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller was already a prolific short story writer; between 1951 and 1957 he would write something like forty short stories and novellas, unleashing a meteor shower of content. Of course his career in the field would climax with the publication of A Canticle for Leibowitz, to this day a beloved classic which continues to resonate with both secular and religious readers. After 1960, however, Miller would disappear from the field, never having so much as one more word of his fiction published in his lifetime, with his second novel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, being finished by Terry Bisson (at Miller’s request) and released posthumously.

After decades of battling depression and his wartime trauma (he was a bomber crewman during World War II), and with the death of his wife apparently being the last straw, Miller committed suicide in 1996.

“The Lineman” is the final story of Miller’s to be published during that meteor shower of fiction, and is by extension the last thing he saw published that wasn’t related to A Canticle for Leibowitz. This is a new read for me; the only experience I’ve had with Miller previously are his Hugo-winners, those being Leibowitz and his 1955 novella “The Darfsteller.” I might review “The Darfsteller” eventually, who knows? And I do want to read more by Miller, despite not being a Catholic or even a Christian; I find his brand of theological inquiry to be quite affecting at times.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1957 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. You’d think Miller having one of the most famous SF novels of the ’50s under his belt would mean his other fiction would be readily available. You’d also be wrong. As far as single-author collections go you basically have one choice, which is The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr.—and I know what you’re thinking, there’s also Dark Benediction. The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr. and Dark Benediction are, as far as I can tell, the same damn collection, with the same damn stories in the same damn order; they’re also seemingly out of print. As far as anthology reprints go we also don’t have many options, though “The Lineman” does appear in David G. Hartwell’s super-chunky anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction, which I’d say is definitely a book to have in your library if you’re a slut for reprint anthologies like myself.

Enhancing Image

Unlike a lot of stories set on the moon, “The Lineman” takes place during the early stages of setting up lunar colonies—not just one colony, but apparently operations headed by several countries, with the U.N. as the referee. Bill Relke is the titular lineman, being part of an American construction crew in the midst of building communication lines. High-speed internet wasn’t a thing yet.

Something to note right off the bat about this novella is that unlike A Canticle for Leibowitz, which only really betrays the time of its conception with references to nuclear armageddon, “The Lineman” eats, lives, breathes, and almost certainly shits the 1950s. Our entirely male construction crewmen talk in ’50s slang, with a heavy dose of hardboiled dialogue that wouldn’t feel out of place in a black-and-white film noir. The conflict of the story is also twofold, and both have to do with the presence of women on the moon during colony-building. Relke has to deal with some goons who work for an underground society that seeks to overturn something called the Schneider-Volkov Act, but that only turns out to be the beginning of his problems.

A ship lands not too far from the site, and it’s not with any known country’s effort to colonize the moon; indeed, it seems to be a commercial vessel. The first twist is that the ship is full of women (“The Ship Is Full of Women” sounds like one of Fritz Leiber’s lesser stories), and the second is that it’s a space-faring whorehouse. Oh yes, our hard-working men are met with French-Algerian “entertainers,” and you know this was written in the mid-’50s because Algeria is still a French colony in the world of the story. Hell, Algeria would no longer be a French colony by 1965, let alone 2065. Since the men (including Relke) have gotten zero pussy for as long as they’ve been on the moon, this causes a big commotion.

Crews being all-male is also given a very of-its-time explanation in the form of the Schneider-Volkov Act. As Joe Novotny, Relke’s superior, explains:

Relke: “Say, Joe, how come they let dames in an entertainment troupe come to the moon, but they won’t let our wives come? I thought the Schneider-Volkov Act was supposed to keep all women out of space, period.”

“No, they couldn’t get away with putting it like that. Against the WP constitution. The law just says that all personnel on any member country’s lunar project must be of a single sex. Theoretically some country—Russia, maybe—could start an all-girl lunar mine project, say. Theoretically. But how many lady muckers do you know? Even in Russia.”

Didn’t Robert Heinlein’s short story “Delilah and the Space-Rigger” already solve this issue?

The master of the ship is, Madame d’Annecy, who turns out to be quite a pragmatic actor. Clearly she’s here for business, and she doesn’t care if the construction guys temporarily jeopardize their own operation to get some tail so long as they’re paying. There is an ulterior motive here, but I’ll save that for spoilers; just saying d’Annecy is one of two major female characters here (which is two more than I was expecting, given the setting), and you sure can’t accuse her of bending the knee for any man who passes her way. The worst thing about d’Annecy, really, is that her business relationship with her girls is shown to be perhaps a little morally dubious (I know what you’re thinking, it’s prostitution, of course it’s morally dubious, but sex work is work). The only way we even figure d’Annecy is on the shady side is by what we know about Giselle, who’s another can of worms.

To make a long story short, Relke and Giselle get stranded together for the middle part of the story, taking refuge in a building which is not quite finished yet. Pressure suits play a big part in “The Lineman,” which makes sense since the moon has no atmosphere, and Giselle (one of d’Annecy’s girls, of course) nearly gets killed before she and Relke have even started to get to know each other. Maybe it’s best that something always conveniently happens to stop them from completing their business transaction, as Relke realizes at one point.

Relke watched her grumpily while she warmed her behind at the oven. She’s not more than fifteen, he decided suddenly. It made him a little queasy. Come on, Joe, hurry.

Uh oh.

In fairness to Relke, he stops getting all touchy-feely with Giselle once it becomes apparent that maybe they shouldn’t be doing this. Not that Giselle would be new to this sort of thing, but safe to say that doesn’t make it not wrong. Relke not only has gotten zero pussy as of late, but is still recovering from his wife leaving him (I imagine the divorce rate for moon men is high), and Giselle… has her own problems. We then come to one of my favorite passages in the story, and one of those things that reminded me that this was, in fact, written by the same guy who wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz.

She was dangerously close to that state of mind which precedes the telling of a life history. He didn’t want to hear it; he already knew it. So she was in a nunnery; Relke was not surprised. Some people had to polarize themselves. If they broke free from one pole, they had to seek its opposite. People with no middle ground. Black, or if not black, then white, never gray. Law, or criminality. God, or Satan. The cloister, or a whorehouse. Eternally a choice of all or nothing-at-all, and they couldn’t see that they made things that way for themselves. They set fire to every bridge they ever crossed—so that even a cow creek became a Rubicon, and every crossing was on a tightrope.

It’s a bit of a downer. You’d think that a religious author like Walter M. Miller Jr. would steer away from the uglier aspects of existence, not to mention the ambivalence of it all, but Miller was not what we’d call a happy camper. Even to compare Miller to other Catholic authors is weird, and to do that I’d also have to venture outside of SFF, since honestly I can hardly think of anyone inside the field off the top of my head. I guess there’s R. A. Lafferty, but none of the Lafferty stories I’ve read have struck me as all that theologically informed. Outside of SFF I’m thinking of Evelyn Waugh, who not so subtly tries to invoke a sense of revelation in the reader by having his characters return to the Church of their childhoods. Then there’s Flannery O’Connor, whose stories are often so grotesque that she basically forces the reader to run in the opposite direction of the horror—the opposite direction being God, naturally.

If Miller tries to invoke revelation, it’s with a good deal of accompanying skepticism, or at least a distinct melancholy that adds bitterness to the moment of divine release. Taken literally, the dilemma of the lunar colonizers being denied one half of the human race seemingly arbitrarily is a bit hard to take, but if taken as a metaphor, with the moon as a purgatorial level of existence, then I can see the logic behind it. Pretty much everyone agrees the Schneider-Volkov Act is something to be repealed (and by today’s standards it sounds nonsensical to boot), but how that problem gets resolved is pretty interesting.

There Be Spoilers Here

There are, to my recollection, three deaths in “The Lineman,” and they’re all accidental and involve pressure suits; they also happen at specific points in the story, each happening in one third of the length. As such, the story begins and ends with a death. The good news is that Madame d’Annecy’s plan to seduce the colonizers with her business will probably result in the Schneider-Volkov Act being repealed, and those secret society goons whom I’ve barely mentioned got their comeuppance. The bad news is that Relke has to let go of Giselle, and he also loses a couple friends by the end of it. Still, he’s the lineman of the crew, and he has to keep building the line—to make the moon a place where people can really live.

It’s during this final scene, where an improvised funeral is held for someone who’s just died in a pressure suit accident, that we get my absolute favorite passage in the story, and it’s something that’s definitely clicked with me—even made me reevaluate what I had been reading to some degree. It’s that powerful, and it also works so well as the end point to Relke’s arc.

Relke looked up slowly and let his eyes wander slowly across the horizon. There were still some meteorites coming in, making bright little winks of fire where they hit into the plain. Deadly stingers out of nowhere, heading nowhere, impartially orbiting, random as rain, random as death. The debris of creation. Relke decided Braxton was wrong. There was a God all right, maybe personal, maybe not, but there was a God, and He wasn’t mean. His universe was a deadly contraption, but maybe there wasn’t any way to build a universe that wasn’t a deadly contraption—like a square circle. He made the contraption, and He put Man in it, and Man was a fairly deadly contraption himself. But the funny part of it was, there wasn’t a damn thing the universe could do to a man that a man wasn’t built to endure. He could even endure it when it killed him. And gradually he could get the better of it. It was the consistency of matched qualities—random mercilessness and human endurance—and it wasn’t mean, it was a fair match.

There’s this old saying in SF about transcendence, and I don’t think it gets brought up anymore. The unique thing about SF is that a transcendent moment can come in a secular context—I’m thinking the ending to A. E. van Vogt’s short story “The Seesaw,” which I think was also reused for The Weapon Shops of Isher. There’s also the ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course. Transcendence in SF comes usually from mankind (be it one person or the whole race) either making contact with something of godlike awesomeness, or becoming that godlike awesomeness. Transcendence is when you meet with something so much greater than yourself that you can’t even calculate it. With “The Lineman” it’s definitely the former, but unlike the vast majority of SF, Miller puts his big transcendental moment in a religious context, with Relke experiencing a religious awakening that sets him on a path of wanting to become not just a man, but a good man.

The ending of “The Lineman” really makes it. I think it’s astounding. As a uniquely science-fictional allegory about mankind getting in touch with the divine part of his nature while in the midst of temptation and horrors, It comes admirably close to striking a fine balance. I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t believe in what Miller believed at the time, and the fact that he would eventually lose both his faith and his life makes the cautious optimism of the ending all the more powerful.

A Step Farther Out

I came out of “The Lineman” a little mixed on it, but ultimately I have to say it was quite effective. Normally when I read something for the sake of reviewing it, I end up with about a page of “notes” on it, which are really just lines from the story that I decided to quote, for good reasons or bad; with “The Lineman” I got about two and a half pages of quotes. When Miller’s on the ball, he’s really on the ball, even if maybe this could’ve been cut down to novelette length. I do have to wonder if the subplot with the secret society was necessary, but then this was back when action narratives were, if not mandatory, then highly incentivized in SF magazine writing. And yet part of what makes “The Lineman” so memorable is how it continually jumps back and forth between pulpy action and genuine metaphysical observations, and how ultimately these two converge.

What fascinates me about Walter M. Miller, Jr. is that he chose to write in a field that was paradoxically both niche and commercial like science fiction, when he could’ve taken his religious concerns and put out some “respectable” literary fiction. That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? “The Lineman” can’t work as literary fiction; its themes are tied intrinsically to its premise. It’s a ruthlessly told story because the moon ~~is a harsh mistress~~ is a ruthless place. The same thing can be said for A Canticle for Leibowitz, which must out of necessity be a post-apocalypse tale in order to justify its inquiries about religion and human nature. It’s weird because science fiction was (and still largely is) stereotypically known for being, if not atheistic or agnostic, then secular; the authors of faith did not tend to write about said faith. Yet Miller, while openly Catholic, did not seek to force conversion upon his readers, but rather to make them think about questions not normally asked in the genre, such as mankind’s place in a universe which is assumed to have a divine overseer—you could say God, Christian or otherwise.

If Miller’s work seems flawed (and everything I’ve read by him so far is prone to a certain excess) then we only have to take the fact that he wrote SF in the ’50s for what it is: the necessary, if imperfect, prerequisite for this artist to find his footing. That Miller stopped writing after 1960, missing out on the New Wave and beyond, speaks perhaps of his fondness for the crossroads which SF in the ’50s found itself at, being more sophisticated than what came in the ’40s but not being as self-consciously experimental as what would come later. Maybe Walter M. Miller Jr. could’ve only done what he did, and say what he wanted to in the way he wanted, during a specific period in the genre’s history. Regardless, we’ll probably never get another voice in the field quite like his.

Nor should we.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (Part 3/3)

August 20th, 2022

(Cover by Richard Arbib. Galaxy, March 1952.)

Who Goes There?

We’ve come to the final part of Alfred Bester’s debut novel, The Demolished Man. Bester arrived to novel-writing late, already being deep in his 30s when his debut was serialized, and truth be told, he wasn’t much of a novelist; he only wrote a handful of novels in his lifetime, and his first two remain by far the most famous. Like some of his contemporaries, (Theodore Sturgeon, C. M. Kornbluth), Bester hit a remarkable stride in the ’50s, starting with “Oddy and Id” in 1950 and ending with “The Pi Man” in 1959. I have to assume the broadening of the SF market in the early ’50s, namely the premieres of Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, coaxed Bester back to genre writing, after a near-decade-long break from the field.

Placing Coordinates

Do I really need to tell you? Part 3 of The Demolished Man was published in the March 1952 issue of Galaxy, and yes, it’s on the Archive.

What strikes me about this particular issue of Galaxy is that there are at least two stories here that not only come off stronger than the serial, but give a more accurate impression of what the newfangled magazine was all about. Yeah, I’m letting you know this early on that I wasn’t a big fan of the conclusion to Bester’s novel, but I would still recommend checking out the issue it appears in. We get a certified hood classic from Robert Heinlein with his novelette “The Year of the Jackpot” (the subject of one of Galaxy‘s first great covers imo) and we also get a pretty funny outing from Damon Knight with “Catch That Martian.” Early Galaxy is so good that it’s honestly hard to go wrong.

Enhancing Image

You may recall that last time on The Demolished Man, we get two twists for the price of one, one of them interesting, the other horrendous. When searching the depths of Barbara D’Courtney’s unconscious, once she’s taken into the safety of his home, Preston Powell discovers that not only are Barbara and Ben Reich related in some way (implicitly connected to the late Craye D’Courtney, whom Reich had murdered), but that Barbara (who, keep in mind, is consciously at the mental level of a toddler at this point) has a big crush on Powell—which Powell reciprocates.

The horror…

Much of Part 3 concerns Reich’s last-ditch attempt to evade Powell, who knows he had committed murder but can’t prove it objectively. To make a long story short, it’s not enough legally to have an Esper peep on a crime suspect’s deepest thoughts; presumably this is to prevent Espers from having too much power, but even so, the future society of the novel works such that it has become nigh-impossible to commit a crime and get away with it. Powell needs three things to bag Reich: motive, method, and opportunity. We know Reich was at Maria Beaumont’s party from the end of Part 1 (still the novel’s highlight imo), where Craye D’Courtney was hiding, and we know how he could’ve killed the old man.

The means are rather convoluted, but Reich had acquired an “ancient” 20th century pistol and removed the cartridges. Wouldn’t this mean Reich would be shooting blanks? Technically yes, but as Powell explains:

“With a powder charge, you can shoot an ounce of water with enough muzzle velocity to blow out the back of a head if you fire through the victim’s palate. That’s why Reich had to shoot through the mouth. That’s why Kr1/2t found that bit of gel and nothing else. The Projectile, of course, was gone.”

People forget (or don’t know) that even shooting blanks in an enclosed space can still be harmful; in the case of D’Courtney, firing the gun in his mouth was enough to kill him. Powell’s figured out the method.

The opportunity was easy enough to discern. The police team already knew Reich was at the party where D’Courtney had been killed, while everyone else was playing the Sardine game, and you may recall that in Part 2 Powell got a confession out of Gus T8 (Reich’s Esper accomplice) shortly before his death. Reich could’ve figured out where D’Courtney was by way of a peeper. There’s your opportunity.

The big problem Powell runs into is the motive. Now, I won’t give away the details in this section, but I’ll say that Reich’s motive for killing D’Courtney was not what we thought it was. Without a motive, they can’t connect Reich to the crime with objective evidence, and without that, Reich goes free. It looks like Reich is about to win, but Powell, being a top-level Esper (meaning he can fully read a person’s unconscious psyche), does have one last trick up his sleeve…

The cat-and-mouse game that took up much of Part 2 now comes to a head in the serial’s finale, and my feelings on it are quite mixed. The stuff with Powell and Reich is still great. Bester has a special talent for writing wiley and despicable characters, and few are more wiley or despicable than Ben Reich. Much like Gully Foyle, his marginally less evil counterpart in The Stars My Destination, Reich is relentless in his ruthlessness; there is nobody he won’t fuck over to get what he wants. Bester’s snappy style still retains its magic, too, with many passages being just dialogue exchanges with the bare minimum of description, yet rarely if ever is the reader lost in all this. Bester really is one of the writers of dialogue when it comes to ’50s SF.

When he’s good.

When he’s not, we get shit like this (yes it’s the Powell/Barbara subplot):

He kissed her forehead. “You’re growing up fast,” he smiled. “You were just baby-talking yesterday.”

“I’m growing up fast because you promised to wait for me.”

This is BULLSHIT.

I wonder if Piers Anthony is a fan of this novel. Just a thought. Much like Reich himself, the novel is half angel and half louse, and I’m trying to separate one from the other. When it’s good, it’s pretty great; it’s witty, inventive, and as I’ll elaborate on in a bit, the ending is a fair bit thought-provoking. But when it’s not good… it’s almost unreadable. I get the impression that writing at novel-length forced Bester to give into his worst impulses—stuff he wouldn’t normally indulge in at shorter lengths. Some authors, especially in SF, benefit from more succinct writing (opinion, sure, but I really do think SF works best in the novella mode), and Bester is one of those. Part 1 of The Demolished Man shows the novel at its best partly because it focuses the most on its two best assets: Ben Reich, and the way Espers contribute to this future interplanetary society.

There Be Spoilers Here

The problem with Reich’s motive for killing D’Courtney is that it doesn’t make sense. In Part 1, Reich offers to merge his company with D’Courtney’s, but D’Courtney refuses; this turns out to not be true. Upon interrogating Reich about the rejection, the teams finds that Reich had misinterpreted D’Courtney’s response. Now why would Reich take D’Courtney’s acceptance as a rejection? We know now that D’Courtney, when confronted by his killer, was not lying; he really did accept Reich’s offer to merge their companies. Reich’s true motive will have to be uncovered with some weapons-grade mundfuckery, and that’s what Powell does at the climax of Part 3.

The climax of Part 3 is a wild ride that almost rivals the climax of Part 1, even anticipating the mind games Philip K. Dick would play on us with his later novels. Just when Reich is convinced he’s gotten away with murder, his world starts to shrink—literally. People and places Reich knows start to disappear, even including entire planets, and he fears he may be losing his mind (sort of right) or that Powell’s pulling an epic prank on him (absolutely right). Even the sun, for no reason, disappears, and nobody he asks even knows what the sun is anymore. Even confessing to the murder of D’Courtney out of desparation does not release him.

The police looked at each other in surprise. One of them drifted to a corner and picked up an old-fashioned hand phone: “Captain? Got a character here. Calls himself Ben Reich of Sacrament. Claims he killed a party named Craye D’Courtney last month.” After a pause, he grunted and hung up. “A nut,” he said.

“Listen—” Reich began.

“Is he alright?” the policeman asked the doctor.

“Just shaken a little.”

“Listen!” Reich shouted.

The policeman yanked him to his feet and propelled him toward the door of the station. “There ain’t no Preston Powell on the force. There ain’t no D’Courtney killing on the books. Now, out!” And he hurled Reich into the street.

It’s a lot of fun. Eventually the world shrinks to the point where there’s only Reich left—and the one thing that’s scared him since the beginning, the Man With No Face. As it turns out, the Man With No Face is a representation of Reich’s guilt, just as we’ve suspected this whole time, though not quite for the reasons one would’ve assumed. You see, Reich and Barbara are half-siblings; their father is Craye D’Courtney. Through some convoluted backstory we learn that the Reich and D’Courtney family trees intertwined at one point, and not only is Barbara old man D’Courtney’s secret child, but so is Reich. D’Courntey didn’t resist Reich because he felt immense guilt about never acknowledging Reich as his son, and Reich tricked himself into wanting to kill D’Courtney because of some… Oedipal… thing…

So Reich is finished; it almost cost Powell his life, but it was worth it. Only at the very end do we find out what Demolition means, and it’s basically a memory wipe. The society of the novel hasn’t implemented the death penalty in decades, and ~~correctly~~ they regard such a practice as barbaric. Reich lives, in some way, but from now on he will be effectivelybecome a different person—the louse having been separated from the angel, or maybe the other way around. The novel makes an argument regarding criminals that I don’t think I’ve heard before, which is that someone who goes against societal norms must be at least of some value, therefore it’d be a waste to execute that person. It’s a curious argument against the death penalty, and I have to wonder how readers circa 1952 would’ve taken it.

A Step Farther Out

The Demolished Man could just as easily be titled The Diminishing Returns. Not to say it goes downhill exactly, but Part 2 introduces a certain subplot that I would consider the opposite of great; by Part 3 this same subplot was driving me up the fucking wall. I’m not even sure if the “romance” between Powell and Barbara is a product of the novel’s time as it is a quirk of what seems to be Bester’s actual honest-to-goodness worldview; he really did seem to believe in the legitimacy of Freudian psychology. Not to say Freud didn’t do much to advance how we as a species try to understand our own minds, our own desires, and so on, but The Demolished Man may be the most obnoxiously Freudian novel in existence, ultimately much to its detriment. I can see why, between Bester’s first two novels, The Stars My Destination has become the more popular one; the truth is that it holds up better to scrutiny.

I have yet to read the book version of The Demolished Man, but from what I’ve heard it might actually be an improvement over the serialized version, which doesn’t happen too often. Usually the differences between a novel’s serial run and its book incarnation are negligible, but Bester apparently revised his novel to a substantial degree between versions. The result is (from what I’ve heard anyway) a short novel that was made even more concise, even cutting out some of the stuff between Powell and Barbara that makes me feel all shitty inside. Even so, the serial is worth reading; historically it’s nothing short of essential, of course, but it’s still an ultimately statisfying experience, made more palpable by being split into smaller chunks.

Well, the next serial I cover is also something I’ve not read before, despite it being by one of my favorite authors, and like The Demolished Man it also won a Hugo—a Retro Hugo.

See you next time.