Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Novella Review: “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky

August 4th, 2025

(Cover artist not credited. Subterranean, Summer 2010.)

Who Goes There?

Rachel Swirsky has been around for nearly the past twenty years, as a writer but also as an important figure in modern SF fandom. She was the founding editor of PodCastle back in 2008. She has also been open about issues of disability, cultural Judaism, and feminism, which are some of many topics permeating 21st century SFF that were not as prominent (except for feminism) half a century ago. The irony is that her social media presence seems to be oddly miniscule for a modern SFF writer. She won two Nebulas early in her career, for the 2013 prose poem “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” and earlier for the 2010 fantasy novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window.” Maybe not the win, but for my money the nomination was certainly warranted. When it comes to choosing what fiction to review I sometimes fear that I might not have enough to say about the work to warrant its own post (a fear that has come to fruition a few times before), but thankfully this is a meaty novella that almost begs to be given the analysis treatment.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Summer 2010 issue of Subterranean Online, which nowadays you can only access via the Wayback Machine. It’s been reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Five (ed. Jonathan Stran), The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2011 Edition (ed. Rich Horton), Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (ed. Steve Berman and JoSelle Vanderhooft), and the Swirsky collection How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future.

Enhancing Image

In the Land of Flowered Hills, Naeva is a sorceress and also Queen Rayneh’s favorite—as both a sorceress and a lover. This is not cause for scandal at all; on the contrary, lesbianism is treated as compulsory in this land. The Land of Flowered Hills, from Naeva’s view, is virtually paradise, being a matriarchal society where women rule and men are treated as an underclass, even being called “worms” regularly. Childbirth is so frowned upon that women who get stuck with the thankless job of having kids are also treated rather with disdain, being called “broods.” There’s a stringent hierarchy based on gender, and to a lesser extent on class, this being a kind of Social Darwinist nightmare in which the strong abuse the weak without hesitation or regret. This all sounds dystopian, and also ridiculous, like how a misogynist would imagine a matriarchal society in a work of satire, so as to take the piss out of feminism’s more unsavory notions, namely political lesbianism. For women, heterosexuality is universally frowned on, to the point where women who have children willingly with men are labeled perverts. I’m not sure how such a society is supposed to survive in the long run; but then again, given what happens in this story, it doesn’t.

Naeve, for all her loyalty to the crown, gets caught in the crossfire between Rayneh and her daughter Tryce, the latter wanting to take the throne as she believes her mother is unfit to defend the land against an oncoming army of barbarians. The barbarians are, of course, male, which is perhaps the biggest slight for these women, on top of the fact that they breed naturally and have been building their numbers with frightening speed. To make a long story short, Naeve is convinced to turn her back on Rayneh, but this costs her dearly, in that she is hit with a magic arrow and is thus put in a state where she is both alive and dead. She is rendered effectively immortal, but this is on the condition that someone is able to summon her from her coma, and also to provide a vessel for her soul to inhabit, on account of her original body being very much dead. People’s souls in the world of the story can be swapped to other bodies, with the caveat that the owner of that body will die when the new soul departs. That’s the original method transferring souls, anyway. So while the feud with Rayneh and Tryce takes up the first section of the novella, Naeve’s life-death state lasts from years to decades to centuries, so that before long she starts jumping (or rather she is summoned by different people periodically) ahead long after Tryce has died and the Land of Flowered Hills has fallen. Naeve becomes one of a small group of people, called “Insomniacs,” who are stuck in a perpetual state of magic-induced hibernation and revival.

The basic challenge of this novella (whose full title I don’t feel like repeating) is that Naeve herself is rather a horrible person, and the story is told exclusively through her perspective. I’m always kind of intrigued by the thought experiment of knowingly telling a story through the eyes and voice of someone who is thoroughly unlikable; it’s really a tightrope act, which for the most part I think Swirsky pulls off here. This is a story about bigotry and future shock, and I think Swirsky does something ambitious here in that she tries to put us in the mindset of someone who is an active bigot. Naeve’s fierce misandry ends up causing problems for herself and virtually everyone she meets, yet throughout the story she doesn’t change so much as come to the conclusion that she hasn’t changed. Normally in a narrative that’s at least novella-length, such as this, we expect the protagonist to go through some kind of change, to have a revelation or some epiphany, so that something about their character has altered by the end. They had learned a valuable lesson, or have suffered a certain trauma that makes them reevaluate how they understand the world. Yet despite being highly knowledgeable about magic and being considered one of the wisest members of her society, Naeve refuses to change her opinion on the status of men throughout the story, even when she befriends a man named Pasha briefly (and I do mean briefly, he’s barely in it before being killed off), a friendship that she writes off as being an exception that proves the rule. By the time Naeve gets resurrected for the last time, at the hands of a nerdy but cute scholar named Misa, she has not really aged or even changed as a person at all while literal centuries have passed by her.

Swirsky plays with fantasy conventions quite a bit here, mostly to good effect, although I have to admit I don’t really care for the whimsical-poetic prose style she goes for. After having read and reviewed a decent amount of fantasy over the years I can say that when it comes to English-language literature there are basically only two schools of fantasy writing: British and American. These are not mutually exclusive, and indeed someone who is British or American will not necessarily write in their respective nation’s school of writing; this is especially true with American writers, who to this day have a bad habit of copping notes from the British. In the British school the key forerunners are J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, William Morris, and Lord Dunsany. In the US you have Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Fritz Leiber. One of these clearly has more of a stranglehold on modern fantasy writing, even among Americans, than the other. The Land of Flowered Hills itself even has a vaguely Lord Dunsany-esque ring to its name. With all due respect to Swirsky, because her issue is by no means unique to her (if anything it’s far too common), trying to capture Dunsany’s exquisiteness of style is a bit of a fool’s errand; too often it comes off as cutesy and cloying.

There Be Spoilers Here

Naeve is summoned in the body of a straw dummy, which makes things awkward when she and Misa inevitably have a sexual/romantic relationship. Misa lives in and for academia, and being a scholar she is naturally taken by Naeve’s antiquity and knowledge regarding magic, although she’s disgusted by Naeve’s misandry. There’s that joke where you have a seemingly liberal white woman and her disgustingly racist boyfriend whose bigotry she just kind of, ignores? Enables? I think we’re supposed to sympathize with Misa here, but it’s hard to sympathize with someone who, perhaps against their better judgment, falls for someone as unlikable and toxic as Naeve. Generally, and this could be because we’re stuck in Naeve’s shoes the whole time, Swirsky seems to think that we out to at least take pity on Our Anti-Heroine™ for her inability to ~~become a decent person~~ adapt with the changing times. One might take pity on Naeve the same way one might take pity on an older family member whose brain has clearly been fried from watching Fox News nonstop and utterly failing to question the basic evils of our society, but personally I don’t feel sorry for these people. I simply can’t. Why? Because bigotry kills. Bigotry is as much a tool used in the violence and tyranny that terrorizes marginalized groups, except because it’s invisible and immaterial it’s something that people are willing to give a pass. But this mindset is put to the test when the academy and its environs are threatened by a plague, which is apparently magic-induced, and (surprise, surprise) Naeve just so happens to be the only one who knows a way to cure it. But, aha, she refuses to give this cure to the male members, condemning about half the populace to a painful death.

This is abhorrent. I mean there’s really no excuse made for why Naeve should have the right to condemn hundreds and even thousands because of her stupid and childish prejudices, but Misa and her colleagues fail to question Naeve’s stupidity seriously before basically mind-raping her for the cure. The results are disastrous. Everyone around Naeve is horrifically injured and even having gotten the cure, they come to the conclusion that she’s too dangerous to keep awake. The whole back half of the story is quite interesting, as much for what isn’t said (or maybe what Swirky did not intend) as what is. The idea is that you have a conservative who is quite literally ancient, thrust into a small society of liberals, the result being that neither side is willing to budge, nor is anybody willing to articulate their own position without coming off as an asshole. I see this as a critique of the kind of liberalism that takes hold in academia, in that these scholars take pride in the idea of multiculturalism, but are unwilling to challenge positions that are tangibly harmful for society, especially for those who are in some kind of second-class position. For reasons that are never given, Misa and her colleagues are totally incapable of explaining to Naeve just why it is that egalitarianism is important for a society to survive, which might be the point. Unfortunately the climax gets the wind knocked out of its sails by virtue of the ending, or rather the lack of an ending. Naeve is put into hibernation, before being awakened by some god-like entity. We’re told that we have reached the end of this universe, and that Naeve and her fellow Insomniacs will be carried over to the new universe—only as what is not made clear.

What the fuck is this? Nothing is resolved, Naeve’s character hasn’t changed much at all, and now I’m wondering, since she will apparently lose her consciousness in this new universe, how she is even telling this story to us. It’s a fallacy of first-person narration that even seasoned professionals are prone to making, but still it’s annoying. Why and especially how is Naeve telling us this story? Who is she talking to? We never get an answer to these questions, and they’re questions that didn’t need to be asked in the first place, only I couldn’t help but wonder about them.

A Step Farther Out

Its pacing is a bit lopsided, its ending comes off like a wet fart, and I did not fall in love with the style like I’ve seen some other reviewers do; but with that said, this is a fascinating and even harrowing read. It has a few obvious flaws, which seem to come from someone still being early in her writing career (Swirsky would’ve only been 26 or 27 when she wrote it), but it’s impressive enough on its face that I understand the awards attention. Hell, I appreciate that people actually paid attention to a novella that was published in a magazine and not as a chapbook, in the year 2010. This was before Tor Books (by that I really mean Macmillan) started monopolizing on chapbooks, so that virtually every SFF novella that hopes to find a decent readership nowadays will have to come to us in the form of a flimsy and overpriced chapbook. For $15 you can buy a slim hardcover that you can read through in a couple hours, compared to $10 for a magazine issue that has at least twice as much fiction between its covers! Sorry, I’m a little bitter. Point is I do recommend Swirky’s story.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: August 2025

August 1st, 2025
(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Astounding, November 1955.)

So I had read Anne McCaffrey’s “The Weather on Welladays,” and I didn’t like it. I’ve read Dragonflight and The Ship Who Sang, plus one other novel and a few short stories now, and I’m still not really sure what McCaffrey’s appeal is (I say this as someone who jumps to defend A. E. van Vogt’s early work). “The Weather on Welladay” isn’t bad, but it’s seriously hampered by being a novelette where the perspective shifts several times so that we have a few protagonists, when ideally we should have only one. I also just don’t think McCaffrey is that good a writer when compared with some of her peers, who were (and still are) not as popular. It’s nice that McCaffrey was the first woman to win both a Hugo and Nebula for fiction, but I wish those honors had gone to better writers. That’s the gist of how I felt about it, in case you’re wondering where my review post for it is.

The funny thing is that I had too good a time during the couple of days I normally would’ve spent on reading and writing for this site, which is ironic. I struggle to write here either when my personal life is at a peak or when it’s deep in a valley. I have to admit to you, the five of you who actually read these posts, that I sometimes resent writing—well, really anything, but especially for SFF Remembrance. Sometimes I just don’t feel like writing anything, but the problem is that if you stop writing then it can be a real challenge to start again. Writing (if you’re “a writer”) is like brushing your teeth, in that ideally it should be a daily activity. But I also don’t like writing that much; yet at the same time I can barely do anything else that would be considered “productive.” I work a service job. I pay my bills and my rent and my taxes like a “good American,” but I feel like I don’t create anything. I have this urge, or maybe this sense of obligation, to create something that is of any value, but I can’t do it. I hate myself and this country I am forced to live in. The environment is hostile, for creativity but also just for human decency. It’s like that Godspeed You! Black Emperor song: “We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.” I hate being here, and yet I’m not sure where I could be that’s better. I hate that this is a culture that worships money and productivity. We must have infinite growth, even if the destination is oblivion.

Putting aside that I’m forced to live in this body, and in this third-rate backwater country called America, things are going well for me! Maybe that’s the problem: on a personal I’m doing well, for the most part, but I get the sense that this contentedness will not last, because the world around me is dying. My surroundings are transient. There will surely come a point where the workers of the world will have their revenge and the last politician is strangled with the entrails of the last capitalist; but I’m convinced that I will not live to see any of this happen. Not even the beginning of it. I will have made my way for the exit before this play called The Downfall of Capitalism will have even gotten to its prelude. The curtains will not have risen and we will not see the stage, let alone the actors. There is a future on the way, but something tells me I won’t take part in it.

…

This is getting to be a bit much.

What’s the holdup? After all, it’s a packed month, as far as my review schedule goes, and I’ve really been meaning to get to some of these works for a hot minute. I’m also taking advantage of the loophole I had made for myself and so I have a serial from Galaxy, on top of a novella. We’ve got one story from the 1920s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1950s, one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, one from the 1980s, and one from the 2010s. This might be my most diverse roster yet, in terms of when the works were published. Well, let’s get to it.

For the serials:
1. A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, March to May-June 1971. Nebula winner for Best Novel. When Galaxy changed editors in 1969, readers at the time as well as historians are prone to say the change was a downgrade. One major plus, however, of Ejler Jakobsson taking over was that we got several Silverberg novels in the magazine as serials in rather quick succession. Despite the acclaim he was earning, A Time of Changes was the only Silverberg novel from this period to win a major award.
2. Under Pressure by Frank Herbert. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1955 to January 1956. Also titled The Dragon in the Sea, this was Herbert’s first novel, after he had been in the field for a few years already with now-forgotten short fiction. Herbert’s legacy pretty much solely rests on his Dune series, to the point where it might surprise the reader to find any Herbert that isn’t Dune-related in the wild. I’ve heard from a friend or two that this is actually supposed to be one of Herbert’s best, but we’ll see about that.
For the novellas:
1. “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky. From the Summer 2010 issue of Subterranean Online. Nebula winner for Best Novella. More controversially Swirsky also won a Nebula for her story “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She was also the founding editor of PodCastle, which is crazy to me because she was like, 26? She’s written a good deal of short fiction and poetry over the years, plus one novel so far.
2. “A Tragedy of Errors” by Poul Anderson. From the February 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been a minute since we last covered Anderson, made more conspicuous because he wrote a truly staggering amount of fiction. Of Anderson’s several series the most ambitious might be his Technic History, a centuries-spanning saga tracing the rise and fall of a galactic empire. “A Tragedy of Errors” takes place toward the end of this future history’s timeline.
For the short stories:
1. “The Storm King” by Joan D. Vinge. From the April 1980 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Not quite as well-known as her late ex-husband, Vernor, partly on account of the fact that she hasn’t written much over the past four decades, but Joan D. Vinge was one of the most promising new writers of the post-New Wave era. She’s more known for her SF, but “The Storm King” is fantasy.
2. “The Woman of the Wood” by A. Merritt. From the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. In the ’20s and ’30s Merritt was one of the most popular pulp writers, even getting a magazine named after him. I was set to review one of Merritt’s novels a couple years ago, but I could not get far into it. Well, now it’s time to correct things a bit. Curiously Merritt didn’t write much short fiction.
For the complete novel:
1. The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok. From the December 1942 issue of Unknown. Bok was known far more for his artwork than his fiction, which is understandable given that he was one of the most gifted and recognizable SFF artists of the ’40s and ’50s. You kinda know a certain magazine or book cover is a Bok work just from looking at it. That Bok died relatively young and in poverty, after having all but retired from illustrating, is tragic. Of course, we might not even know about Bok in the first place if not for Ray Bradbury acting as cheerleader for his early material. Bok was really one of the few mavericks of SFF from that era, being a semi-closeted gay man with some niche hobbies, who was also a perfectionist when it came to his art. The Sorcerer’s Ship was Bok’s debut novel and was published complete in Unknown, but would not see book publication until after his death.
Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “Eeeetz Ch” by H. H. Hollis

July 29th, 2025

(Cover by Dember. Galaxy, November 1968.)

Who Goes There?

This might not be surprising, but H. H. Hollis is a pseudonym for one Ben Neal Ramey, who like a lot of people in the field used a pseudonym to separate his SF work from his well-paying day job. Hollis never wrote a novel, and there has never been a volume collecting what little short fiction he wrote, although it would not be hard to print a one-volume edition containing all of Hollis’s SF. He got two Nebula nominations, actually in the same year, but nothing else as far as awards attention goes. He’s honestly an ideal candidate for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in the future, since he’s very much a forgotten writer when he probably should not be that obscure. I’ve read a couple Hollis stories and they certainly have their points of interest. “Eeeetz Ch” (what a title, huh) is one of quite a few SF stories about cetaceans that rather conspicuously started popping up in the ’60s. There was Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island. There was Margaret St. Clair’s The Dolphins of Altair. There was Gordon R. Dickson’s “Dolphin’s Way.” There’s even the story I’ll be reviewing in a couple day which also involves cetaceans. Not to say there was zero interest beforehand, but there was clearly a sea change in popular interest in cetaceans that happened in the early ’60s, culminating in what now feel like totally inexplicable crazes like the album Songs of the Humpback Whale.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It has never been reprinted in English, which I have to say reeks of bullshit considering there are way worse stories than “Eeeetz Ch” that have gotten reprinted multiple times.

Enhancing Image

Ramon Coatle is a senator from Hawaii who has been given I suppose the unenviable task of surveying the Caribbean Research Station, an off-shore American research facility specializing in—you can guess by this point—the intelligence of dolphins. Specifically they’re studying dolphins as a kind of substitute for computers, since dolphins, as it turns out, are highly intelligent, albeit of the calculating variety. A dolphin, even if given the tools, is unlikely to understand the philosophical complexities of, say, Hamlet. As one of the scientists puts it:

“[F]rom a man-centered view of reality all that happens is that, like a computer, they have much faster access to stored information than we do, and much faster manipulation of it. But creative, intuitive use of it? Not in human terms. If that is the measure of true intelligence, then these big, seagoing cats are not very intelligent. They’re just better equipped to handle information.”

The scientists compares the dolphins to cats, but really they’re more like rats, both in their intelligence but also in the tests they’re subjected to at the facility. There are several human characters in “Eeeetz Ch,” but of course the most memorable character is Eeetz ch himself, who is the main dolphin being tested, by virtue of being the first. Eeeetz ch has the intelligence of a well-adjusted human adult, although (as will become a cliche with writing uplifted dolphins in SF) he is rather mischievous. Coatle and the others communicate with the dolphins through a computer translator, since the dolphins are physiologically incapable of human speech; meanwhile Eeeetz ch is hoping his human companions will try to learn his language, his own name as given being an approximation of what it would be in dolphin tongue. There’s a bit of a language barrier, and also the fact that these are two intelligent races who previously had not been able to have a conversation. Dolphins and their close relatives are indeed the closest we have to alien life on Earth, is what Hollis seems to be implying.

In the ’60s, and even for a while after, there seemed to be a reluctance in SF to introduce advanced robotics and unmanned drones, despite the obvious advantages in terms of saving human life and such—or maybe it’s because of these advantages that writers were slow to hop on robot-controlled spaceships and exploration units, until it became too glaring a thing to deny. It would be like denying Darwinian evolution in [the current year], in that normal people would immediately raise their eyebrows with suspicion. As such, in the world of “Eeeetz Ch,” the folks at NASA and elsewhere seem to think investing in uplifted dolphins that can control spaceships remotely would be more feasible than to have artificially intelligent robots do the same damn thing. As mentioned before, the people at the research facility already think of the dolphins there as like lively and quirky computers with fins. This all sounds a bit far-fetched, made more glaring since “Eeeetz Ch” would be published less than a year prior to the moon landing. In-story the prospect of landing on the moon is still treated as theoretically, which is something that would date the story in almost record-time. Another thing that dates the story is the treatment of its sole female character of note, Marguerite, who is one of Eeeetz ch’s human companions, and who honestly comes off as a bit of a shrew; her tendency to be on the emotionally volatile side is certainly conspicuous compared to her male colleagues’ reasonableness, although she does seem to mean well.

(Interior by Dan Adkins.)

The stranger aspects of the research regarding Eeeetz ch, such as prosthetic hands being developed for his fins (this being illustrated uncannily, courtesy of Dan Adkins), now strike me as almost proto-cyberpunk. This is not just because of the topic of cybernetics with how the uplifted dolphins (and conversely the human who swim with their test subjects) are being at least slightly mechanized to better fit their environment, but also (and this is almot certainly a coincidence) the fact that there’s a similarly uplifted dolphin in a certain seminal work of cyberpunk. I’m talking about William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic,” which features a drug-addled hyper-intelligent hacker dolphin that floats in a tank. (It is a weird story, for sure.) Eeeetz ch and his ilk are given prospethic hands that take advantage of the fact that cetaceans’ finsss are basically mammal finger joints that have been webbed together; meanwhile Marguerite and her partner have metal plates in their chests, machines meant to give them a kind of gills surrogate. Coatl is understandably disturbed by this at first, but after several days he gets used to the humans and dolphins meeting each other halfway like this. Actually he might be getting to like the strange dynamics of the facility a little too much, as the ending shows.

There Be Spoilers Here

This is a hard story to spoil, on account of nothing much dramatic happening. I was a bit taken aback by this myself initially, since I was expecting some kind of dramatic climax, only to realize the story just—ends. Not to say it’s that abrupt an ending, or that it just stops in its tracks, since there is at least some change implied at the end. Coatle leaves the facility for home, wondering if he can even express to his colleagues in Washington what he had seen, never mind how he might convince them of the facility’s non-military utility. Not much may have actually changed throughout the story, in that the stakes were never those of life and death, but something has changed (or maybe been revealed or uncovered) in Coatl’s spirit. “His chest itched, and he scratched it gently. Senator Ramon Coatl knew what his chest itched for: he wanted one of those brass adaptor plates set in it, so he could wear gills.” It’s a bittersweet sentiment that doesn’t become overblown or overstay its welcome, which is nice.

A Step Farther Out

Well, this was an oddly cozy read. “Eeeetz Ch” is curious, not least because it feels both of its time and also ahead of its time. The proto-cyberpunk elements and speculation on dolphin intelligence butt heads with what was clearly an America still licking its wounds from the Apollo 1 tragedy. As far as I can tell there isn’t any anthology collecting SF stories revolving around cetaceans, which on the one hand is a bit odd, but also the fascination with cetaceans in pop culture was such a hippie New Age thing (later examples Ecco the Dolphin and David Brin’s Uplift series notwithstanding) that if such an anthology were to be put together then it would’ve happened at least half a century ago. The moment has passed.

Unless, of course, I became an editor myself.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Body Builders” by Keith Laumer

July 25th, 2025

(Cover by Gray Morrow. Galaxy, August 1966.)

Who Goes There?

I know I’ve read at least one Keith Laumer story before, because he appeared in Dangerous Visions, but I could not tell you what “Test to Destruction” is about at all from memory. Laumer is one of those authors who is surprisingly easy to avoid, or rather to miss, considering how prolific he was in the ’60s. He made his debut in 1959, and spent the next decade or so writing at a feverish pace with a few series under his belt, most notably the episodic Retief series. I almost picked a Retief story for today, but it seems like that series was more associated with If in the ’60s; as such as we have a totally standalone story with “The Body Builders.” Laumer suffered a stroke in 1971, which put him off writing for a few years, and when he did return, he was not the same writer he once was, in both quality and quantity. This dip in quality is understandable, since even a minor stroke requires physical therapy to recover from, and for many authors the same incident would’ve outright meant the end of their careers. Laumer was also one of the pioneering voices of military SF, which makes sense given his military background. “The Body Builders” is a very curious story that I wish I liked more, not least because of how prescient it is.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1966 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted a fair number of times, including The Infinite Arena: Seven Science Fiction Stories About Sports (ed. Terry Carr) and the Laumer collections The Best of Keith Laumer and Keith Laumer: The Lighter Side.

Enhancing Image

Barney Ramm is our narrator as well as our guide to this strange new world, where it has become normal to all but give up one’s physical body in exchange for a more physically attractive robotic surrogate—provided one has the money for certain cosmetics. People’s bodies are kept in “the Files,” hooked up to tubes and physically trained unconsciously just enough so that they won’t be totally emaciated bags of bones. Laumer does not leave us to speculate as to how we got to such a future, because Ramm pretty much tells us outright what the deal is:

Our grandparents found out it was a lot safer and easier to sit in front of the TV screen with feely and smelly attachments than to be out bumping heads with a crowd. It wasn’t long after that that they developed the contact screens to fit your eyeballs, and the plug-in audio, so you began to get the real feel of audience participation. Then, with the big improvements in miniaturization and the new tight-channel transmitters, you could have your own private man-on-the-street pickup. It could roam, seeing the sights, while you racked out on the sofa.

One of the cultural landmarks that separated the ’50s from the ’40s was the rise of commercially viable TV, so that you too could have a TV set in the comfort of your living room. If you were rich then you might’ve even been able to buy two TV sets. Wow. Imagine the possibilities. By the end of the ’50s the TV had become a commonplace household item, at least for those with middle-class incomes or better, and by 1965 (about when Laumer would’ve written this story), TV in color was becoming the new norm. A sharper and more vivid image, closer to real life, or rather the real thing. People living vicariously through their TV sets was apparently on Laumer’s shit list, because he doesn’t even try to hide his fist-shaking sentiments at the medium. On the one hand this could’ve been trite and a little too cranky if done improperly, but to Laumer’s credit it’s how he extrapolates on the proliferation of TV that makes “The Body Builders” worth reading. People tend to walk around in lifelike android bodies that seem to be modeled after movie actors, or at least this is the case with some of them. There’s a John Wayne robot, and Lorena, Ramm’s date at the beginning, is also made to look like Marlene Dietrich.

Now you may be thinking to yourself: this sounds a bit like cyberpunk. And it does, about fifteen years in advance. Ramm being a first-person narrator makes the exposition-dumping more awkward than it should’ve been, in that it does hamper the story somewhat, but Ramm being a “light-heavy champ in the armed singles” (he’s basically a boxer, although it turns out to not be boxing quite as recognize it) with a detective’s intuition and an ear for slang lends the narrative voice a noir feel that would later also become a trope associated with cyberpunk. Of course, classic cyberpunk takes a lot of inspiration from old-school crime fiction a la Raymond Chandler, so this is a case of “The Body Builders” and the subgenre it anticipated both drinking from the same well. Cyberpunk became a codified subgenre by the mid-’80s, but there are quite a few examples of SF that predate it, including but not limited to Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction,” Richard Matheson’s “Steel,” Samuel R. Delany’s Nova, and of course Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Speaking of the Matheson story, I have a hunch that Laumer looked to “Steel” as an influence, or perhaps more likely he was thinking of the Twilight Zone adaptation, which would’ve been more recent when he wrote “The Body Builders.”

This all sounds great, but it’s in service of rather clunky storytelling. There’s really no room for environmental or passive worldbuilding here, since Ramm yaps in Expositionese and tells us upfront about every detail of this world that’s relative to the plot. For the most part Laumer chooses to tell rather than show, which hurts one’s attempts at getting immersed in what should be a memorable and somewhat dystopian future. It doesn’t help that the plot is really basic when you get down to it: Ramm gets ambushed into having an impromptu fight when he’s in the wrong robot body for it, with someone clearly having it out for him. He has, I think two girlfriends? There’s the aforementioned Lorena, who’s shown to be vain and high-class, and then there’s Julie, who believes the “Orggies” are an abomination. Can you guess which one he ends up with ultimately? I’m generally not a fan of how snarky and reliant on slang these characters are; if we’re to be invested in Ramm having his revenge then Laumer should’ve tried to conceive a more likable protagonist first. Despite being nearly thirty magazine pages, the tell-don’t-show method combined with the simplistic plot trajectory result in a story that feels undercooked somehow.

There Be Spoilers Here

If you’ve read “Steel” (and I’ve written about it twice now), then you may remember the ending, which is more or less ambiguous in its tone. Are we are supposed to take this as a victory or a defeat? What is to become of Our Hero™ after he has literally broken a few bones in the name of recapturing the glory days? No such ambiguity in “The Body Builders.” After having deliberately sabotages his robot body, Ramm winds up in his real body, in the Files, nearly dying “for real” in the process. I will say, this is a very good scene, when Ramm “wakes up.” It’s like that scene in The Matrix where Neo wakes up from the virtual world to find himself as a scrawny bald dude, with a big tube shoved down his throat and in what almost resembles a bee hive. It’s a great image, and in the case of “The Body Builders” it’s one of the few moments where Laumer’s craftsmanship really shines through. Of course, despite being a scrawny dude who does not resemble the prize fighter he often lives as, Ramm is still able to win the day by virtue of taking advantage of the fact that Orggies are designed to take on other Orggies—that is to say robots, as opposed to humans. This is Laumer’s way of telling you that you should turn the TV off and go for a jog or something. I know, it’s ironic that I’m instead typing this out, sitting in my comfy office chair in my air-conditioned apartment whose rent I can barely afford. To think when this story was written we didn’t have the internet, or even at-home video games. Laumer had a fine imagination, but he really could not have anticipated what the future would bring.

A Step Farther Out

I like thinking about “The Body Builders,” but I wish it was better as a story. Laumer is perhaps a decent writer who in this case punches above his weight class (sorry for the pun). This same premise and even broad plot structure may have worked better in the hands of someone like Philip K. Dick or Robert Sheckley, but in Laumer’s it lacks the sheer momentum as well as narrative fluidity to be compelling from start to finish. I do somewhat recommend checking it out, though, especially if you wanna read more examples of proto-cyberpunk.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Shall We Have a Little Talk?” by Robert Sheckley

July 21st, 2025

(Cover by John Pederson, Jr. Galaxy, October 1965.)

Who Goes There?

When Horace L. Gold launched Galaxy in 1950, the authors who appeared in those first few issues were (with the notable exception of Richard Matheson) from the previous generation of writers. Clifford Simak, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, etc. It took a few years for a whole new crop of writers to make their mark in Gold’s new magazine, but by the end of 1953 the sea change had become apparent. Like Matheson, you had writers born in the latter half of the ’20s who were maybe a bit too young to have seen action in World War II, these including Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, Charles Beaumont, Alan E. Nourse, Katherine MacLean, Chad Oliver, and of course, Robert Sheckley. Sheckley actually made his debut in the now-forgotten magazine Imagination, in 1952, but he quickly (by that I mean in about six months) spread his work such that he appeared in seemingly every outlet that could have him. He appeared most often (or so it feels, I’ve not done the numbers myself) in Galaxy, though, which makes sense given that Gold and Sheckley were secular Jewish urbanites with similar temperaments, although Gold was—let’s say the more eccentric of the two. (Gold was agoraphobic, and was not all that sociable. He also had a reputation for being a control freak with his writers.) No matter where he went, but especially in Galaxy, Sheckley acted as a court jester, being humorous but also sour.

By the time Fred Pohl took over Galaxy, Sheckley appeared in it far less, although this was not Pohl’s fault, nor was it unique to Galaxy. Sheckley wrote about as much short fiction between 1952 and 1960 as the next 45 years of his life combined. Why did the torrent of short fiction slow down to little more than a trickle? It seems that Sheckley did what most other authors of the time did, which is to say he mostly switched to writing novels. By 1960 the magazine market had eroded, if not imploded. There remained few avenues for making a living as a short-story writer. But while he took a few breaks from writing short stories, Sheckley never stopped completely; and when it came time for Galaxy‘s 15th anniversary issue, he would be there, with “Shall We Have a Little Talk?”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1965 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in the Sheckley collections The People Trap, The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley, The Collected Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley: Book Three, and Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley.

Enhancing Image

Jackson (I assume it’s his last name, we never get a first name from him) is a linguist and agent of the Terran empire, and he’s on a mission. The empire has scouted out another planet with intelligent life, which means another planet that could use some colonizing. It’s clear from the outset that Jackson isn’t here merely to understand an alien language, or just to make first contact for the sake of it, but to oil up the locals for exploitation. With this in mind, Jackson is basically a con man, despite working for what is supposed to be a benign government, and calling him an anti-hero would be a touch generous. Indeed, all it would take is a switching of perspectives to depict Jackson as the story’s villain, albeit villainous by virtue of wanting to swindle rather than the fire-and-brimstone treatment. Luckily for Jackson, the aliens are “bipedal monocephaloids,” which is to say humanoid; they have beige skin and are generally dark-haired, looking perfectly human, although they would not be homo sapiens but a conveniently close-resembling cousin species. In old-timey SF aliens being written as humanoid was often done because the writer was being lazy, or in the case of film and TV for budgetary reasons (and also laziness); but with Sheckley this supposed lack of effort into making alien aliens is very much part of the story’s point. The text is aliens, but that text is only a thin smokescreen for the subtext, which is that the aliens are supposed to be (and indeed are) indigenous peoples. This is a story about an indigenous populace meeting with a would-be colonizer, and you’d have to be rather dense to miss it.

“Shall We Have a Little Talk?” is a first-contact narrative that makes a bee line for the heart of what first-contact narratives are all more or less about, which is to say it’s about power dynamics and one group potentially taking control of another in the name of self interest. We also know this is a story about colonialism because Sheckley aims for the jugular and brings up a certain word that threatens to become overused in the current political climate, but which in some cases really is justified, and which tends to be a logical conclusion of colonialism: genocide. The systemic extermination of a people or race. The most scathing and withering passage of this story actually comes along relatively early, and it’s Sheckley at his most acidic, to the point where he does channel Kurt Vonnegut a bit:

No civilized law-abiding race likes to commit genocide. In fact, the folks on Earth consider genocide a very unpleasant matter, and they don’t like to read about it or anything like it in their morning papers. Envoys must be protected, of course, and murder must be punished; everybody knows that. But it still doesn’t feel nice to read about a genocide over your morning coffee. News like that can spoil a man’s entire day. Three or four genocides and a man just might get angry enough to switch his vote.

The Terran empire is a liberal democracy, having moved on from the free-market capitalism of “the ancients,” who are meant to be us. “The ancients” took what they could get and conquered without even the pretext of wanting to help the people they were robbing; but the Terrans of the future are all about soft power, and robbing indigenous populations with a smile on one’s face. Colonialism has changed its attire, but it’s still colonialism. Same shit, different ass. Jackson wanting an in with the aliens, by learning their language and even buying property on their land, is very much shown to be self-serving. He befriends a real estate fellow, one Mr. Erum, but their friendship is extremely shallow and hinges on Jackson getting what he wants out of the well-meaning Erum, which is to say language and property. It’s a business relationship disguised as friendship; there is nothing to stop Jackson from pulling a gun on Erum. It would, of course, be bad news if Erum were to retaliate if such a thing were to happen, because if one of these aliens were to kill Jackson then it would mean the Terrans basically nuking the whole race from orbit. And nobody wants that.

But they’re always prepared to do it.

I do have to wonder what had inspired Sheckley to write this specific story, because he is clearly responding to something. The vast majority of SF is observational fiction, in that is makes observations on current trends and extrapolates on them. There is some predictive SF, as in SF written with the intent of predicting future trends (most notably this is the kind of SF that Hugo Gernsback really liked), but virtually all of predictive SF has since been left in the dust bin of history. What was happening circa 1964 that made Sheckley so ambivalent? It could be that he was commenting on the JFK and LBJ administrations, which were very liberal but also keen on soft power, especially in Asia. There was the creeping question of what to do about Vietnam, and American intervention in the matter was something which at the time middle America would’ve largely either been ignorant or approving of, although Sheckley would’ve known better. It wasn’t exactly a secret that even by the time of JFK’s team the US had an “advisory team” in South Vietnam. This was a sort of colonial power that landed on the softer end of the spectrum, but as we all know, in the years following the publication of “Shall We Have a Little Talk?” that soft power would turn harder until it became an all-out war effort. Curiously, there was one other notable SF story published in 1965 which seemed to allegorize American involvement in Vietnam, albeit from a hawkish right-wing perspective rather than left-wing, that being Poul Anderson’s The Star Fox. What’s funny is that in both cases the stand-in for the JKF/LBJ administration is shown in an unflattering light, but for different reasons.

There Be Spoilers Here

Of course, just when Jackson thinks he has gotten a hold of the aliens’ tongue (because here, language is a key to unlocking an indigenous populace’s potential for exploitation), Erum and the city council throw a fast one on him, albeit unintentionally. For most of the story the alien language comes off as incomprehensible to human ears, but Jackson takes the time to learn its intricacies and nuances; this knowledge is mostly kept out of the reader’s grasp, but we’re not supposed to understand it anyway. Ultimately the aliens still confound the would-be colonizer, because at the end their language seems to have evolved (or maybe devolved) into variations on a single word: mun. In the span of what has to be a few months at the most the language has changed such that Jackson is simply unable to keep up. So he admits defeat. At the very end, when the aliens are left to themselves, their changing to using a bunch of muns seems to be genuine and not done as a prank, with begs the question of how and why the language so quickly changed like this. It’s evident that Sheckley is not a linguist, but I don’t think this is how language works. Even in the remarkably fast transitioning to early modern English in the 16th century, in which you had kids speaking of a brand of English that was nigh unrecognizable from what their grandparents spoke, it took a generation or two for the change to happen. I feel like Sheckley is counting on his readers being about as knowledgable of linguistics as him; which, to be fair, the vast majority of readers would not know better. It’s like how SF writers feel at liberty to bullshit their way through quantum physics, because hell, nobody really understands quantum physics—not even the people who actually study it.

A Step Farther Out

I think more time could’ve been spent on fleshing out the setting, and the twist does strain one’s suspension of disbelief a bit, but this is classic Sheckley in a good way. It’s not his funniest or his darkest, but there’s both a maturity and a raw pessimism here, minus the cheap laughs and gimmickry of his weaker stuff, that a younger Sheckley would not have gone for with such gusto. I really got the sense that Sheckley had a bone to pick with somebody here, although I can’t make heads or tails as to whom. “Shall We Have a Little Talk” is one of the few later Sheckley stories to appear in Store of the Worlds, and there’s a reason for that.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Rules of the Road” by Norman Spinrad

July 18th, 2025

(Cover by McKenna. Galaxy, December 1964.)

Who Goes There?

Norman Spinrad has had a long and winding career over the past sixty-odd years; in fact he’s the only author we’re covering this month who’s still alive, at least last time I checked. Spinrad was born in 1940, in NYC, and he made his debut in 1963, just before the New Wave kicked into high gear. He’s one of the few prominent New Wavers who did not already have a career by the end of the ’50s. He stirred up controversy a few times, most notably with the novel Bug Jack Baron, which was serialized in New Worlds and which the UK parliament took an issue with on grounds of obscenity. They say all publicity is good publicity, but in the case of Bug Jack Baron the controversy actually contributed to New Worlds (already a small operation under Michael Moorcock) downsizing and ultimately evaporating by the early ’70s. There’s also his novel The Iron Dream, a kind of fictional novel as written by Adolf Hitler in an alternate timeline where Hitler became a hack genre writer instead of, ya know. Spinrad’s later outings are less incendiary. Star Trek fans might recognize his name because he wrote one of the better episodes of the original series, “The Doomsday Machine.” 1964 was Spinrad’s first big year as it saw multiple short stories of his in print, with “The Rules of the Road” sadly being minor Spinrad, being competent but otherwise unindicative of the career he would have.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1964 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in First Step Outward (ed. Robert Hoskins) and the Spinrad collection The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde.

Enhancing Image

Sorry that this will be a shorter review than usual. The story itself is quite short and I didn’t have much to say about it. Sometimes a short story can be densely packed with nuance and flavor so that I’d have more to write about, but this is not the case here.

A giant silver dome has appeared in Yucca Flats, which you may recall has a long history of US military involvement of the nuclear variety. (Its name is also associated with a certain infamously bad ’60s sci-fi movie, but putting that aside…) The dome appeared seemingly overnight and is obviously alien in origin, or else how could it be here. The top brass suspect the dome is some kind of ship, or maybe a “giant mousetrap” for human visitors, being perhaps a deadly labyrinth on the inside. Ten men have already been sent into the dome, and none have come out. The military begrudgingly concludes that it’ll take more than just a soldier or a normal civilian for the job, hence we’re introduced to Bert Lindstrom, a mercenary who’s gotten by on being very lucky—or rather Lindstrom has a borderline supernatural capacity to calculate risk. Risk, for Lindstrom, is indeed the name of the game. He’s a daredevil, but he’s an unusually rational kind of daredevil. Measuring risk is what gives Lindstrom’s life a sense of purpose, and pretty quickly we get that he’s a kind of anti-hero; other than that we find out nothing else about him.

“The Rules of the Road” feels both really short and somehow also protracted, because the premise is so simple and because most of it is effectively a one-man show, albeit with a voice from offscreen talking to Lindstrom, like the stage director hollering at the actors from just outside of the audience’s peripheral vision. It’s an adventure narrative, sure, but there’s actually not that much action, with Spinrad spending more time on Lindstrom’s state of mind as he enters the dome and tries to figure out what traps could be hidden inside it. There’s a bit of scenery porn, and also we do get the sense that something is at stake, although exactly what is not made clear at first. Now, if you’ve read your fair share of pre-New Wave ’60s SF then you may be thinking that this sounds a bit like Algis Budrys’s Rogue Moon, albeit without the melodramatic human drama that propels that novel’s plot, which Spinrad absolutely would have read by this point. I’ve seen people complain about Rogue Moon being far more about the people outside of the deadly labyrinth on the moon than about the labyrinth itself, but “The Rules of the Road” is what that same basic plot might look like if you removed the human element. This is to say that Spinrad’s story has the bones of what should be a compelling little adventure story, but lacks the warmth and intellectual stamina of Budrys’s novel. Mind you that Budrys was not the only author whose footsteps Spinrad seemed to follow, but in order to get to that we’ll be talking about the climax…

There Be Spoilers Here

That the dome is an alien construction is obvious, but what’s less obvious is the nature of the aliens who had constructed it. Are they here to put humanity through some kind of rite of passage, or are they here merely to toy with humanity as a kind of plaything? It turns out to be the former. As the alien host, who we hear but do not see, explains, the universe as we see it is actually an illusion, with our three-dimensional perception being a smokescreen for a universe whose “true” nature would turn the average person’s brain to mush. The true universe is “the road” the humanity will have to learn to navigate if it wants to be on par with the aliens, who clearly are supposed to be far more advanced than us. This is a reveal that would not have been out of place in the pages of Astounding a couple decades earlier, to the point where I feel like A. E. van Vogt had written just the same kind of story as this, with more pyrotechnics and a real sense of hallucinogenic wonder at the vastness of the universe. The big problem with Spinrad’s story, aside from its uneven pacing, is that it’s maybe too sober and rational, too casual about the cosmic potential of its premise. It’s “far out” on paper, but Spinrad did not write it as such. When Lindstrom returns from the dome, having apparently been transformed into “something other than human,” we don’t feel much of anything about it.

A Step Farther Out

Reading very early Spinrad you probably wouldn’t get the impression that he would write something decidedly transgressive like Bug Jack Baron a handful of years later, or that he would be one of the more accomplished New Wavers generally. When read the early stuff of, say, R. A. Lafferty or Roger Zelazny, you could see how they would later rub shoulders with the New Wave, but this is not so with Spinrad. “The Rules of the Road” reads like A. E. van Vogt at a discount, albeit if van Vogt also had a firmer grasp of English. It’s clearly magazine filler, which is a shame.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Think Blue, Count Two” by Cordwainer Smith

July 15th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, February 1963.)

Who Goes There?

Cordwainer Smith was a pseudonym for Paul Linebarger, who wrote SF under as Smith so as to separate that career from his day job as, ya know, working for the US government. Linebarger, as Smith, had one of the most idiosyncratic careers of any writer in the field at the time, this despite his dying relatively young (at just 53) and not having his work pubished regularly until the last half-dozen years of his life. He made his debut, as an adult, with “Scanners Live in Vain” in 1950, after five years of struggling to find a publisher for it, and he would not see print again until 1955 with “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” Smith’s stuff was a little too weird for what was otherwise a highly permissive time in the field’s history; but he had found a couple cheerleaders in the forms of Frederik Pohl and Damon Knight. Pohl and Knight really dug Smith’s material, to the point where Smith appeared in all three issues that Knight had edited for If. “Scanners Live in Vain” would’ve surely wallowed in obscurity longer than it did had Pohl not included it in one of his hardcover anthologies in the early ’50s. From the beginning until his death in 1966, Smith was a “writer’s writer” whose quirks ensured that he would always have a cult following.

When Pohl took over Galaxy and If circa 1961, he made a deal with Smith to have first dibs on Smith’s material going forward, and indeed with a few exceptions all of Smith’s work published from about 1962 until his death saw print in Galaxy or If. “Think Blue, Count Two” is, like nearly all of Smith’s fiction, set in the Instrumentality of Mankind universe, a mind-boggling future history that sadly Smith did not live to finish. You have a far future with comically large spaceships, genetically engineered animal-people, and an interplanetary government that is somehow both omnipresent and whose agents we don’t actually see. This is all conveyed with a style that is rather tell-y and stilted, in a way that either you’ll like or you won’t. Also even by the standards of old-timey writers, Smith was a big fan of cats. Like really. Like he was kind of a proto-furry.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1963 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in Elsewhere and Elsewhen (ed. Groff Conklin) and the Smith collections The Instrumentality of Mankind and The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith.

Enhancing Image

“Think Blue, Count Two” is set fairly early in the Instrumentality timeline, taking place sometime after “Scanners Live in Vain” but before “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” Unfortunately Smith lost his notebook that had a mapped-out timeline for his future history, so the best we have is guess work. This makes it even harder to find an entry point for the series. Smith’s style of narration is unconventional no matter how you look at it, since despite the action taking place in the far future, the narrator acts as if said action had already happened in the distant past. We have a future history that is self-mythologizing, and also a far-future humanity whose use of English is a bit different from ours. Smith was fluent in multiple language (something like five or six, which is ridiculous and nigh-incomprehensible by today’s standards), and his childhood being partly spent in China in the early years of the 20th century seemed to shape his understanding of language. Not to say he’s a master stylist, a la Fritz Leiber or Ted Sturgeon if we’re talking contemporaries, but rather he has more in common with J. R. R. Tolkien, for both his worldbuilding and his understanding of linguistics. Smith’s future history is weird and densely packed. As for this story we’re actually told the basic plot right at the beginning, before anything actually happens, although it’s easy to overlook this. “A young man, bright of skin and hair, merry at heart, set out for a new world. An older man, his hair touched with gray, went with him. So, too, did thirty thousand others. And also, the most beautiful girl on earth.” But we won’t be introduced to the girl or the men she’ll be accompanying for a minute.

See, space travel in the Instrumentality universe is a big gamble, and at best still takes a lot of work. Most writers of the period depicted space travel as being convenient to the point of straining one’s suspension of disbelief; there’s always some workaround for the speed-of-light problem, not to mention time dilation is usually not factored into things. Not to mention ships would require a truly monstrous amount of energy and propulsion to get through space. Someone like Poul Anderson would make a game out of how spaceships might work. As for Smith, these ships are impossibly large hulking machines, but also space travel is shown to be quite horrible. The whole plot of “Think Blue, Count Two” kicks off because some technicians are prepping a colony ship for a voyage to a distant planet, in a journey that would take centuries of objective time, without repeating the disaster of Old Twenty-two. Basically what happened on Old Twenty-two is that something happened with the sailor (the ship’s human navigator) that required some of the passengers be awoken from cold sleep. “They did not get on well with one another. Or else they got on too horribly well, in the wrong way.” We don’t get specifics, but the gist of it is that all hell broke loose and life aboard Old Twenty-two descended into death and debauchery. For this next trip, the technicians and the “psychological guard” (Smith doesn’t really explain what a psychological guard, but it’s like a psychologist and an engineer rolled into one job) have a safeguard in the form of Veesey, a 15-year-old girl who does not stand out at all aside from her beauty. In fact, Veesey doesn’t have any special skills, except for one thing: she’s to play the daughter role, so that no adult should wanna harm her.

Now, this next part is very weird, so bear with me: Veesey, while she’s in cold sleep, is mind-linked with a laminated mouse brain that is both dead and alive, or rather the mouse is dead but its brain is active—indeed the brain, which is wrapped in plastic, will be active for literally thousands of years assuming it’s never destroyed. Veesey’s telepathic link with the mouse brain (yeah) relies on her unconsciously memorizing a certain TV serial, as well as a nursery rhyme, which goes like this:

Lady if a man
Tries to bother you, you can
Think blue,
Count two,
And look for a red shoe.

If Veesey need ever recite the rhyme, help will come to her aid. How help would come to her aid is not explained, and anyway saying it now would be giving away a big spoiler. You might have noticed that we’re a bit of a ways into the review and, if you’ve read the story already and have it fresh enough in your mind, I’ve barely even tackled the plot. The pacing here is a bit wonky, which truth be told is a problem I often have with Smith, which might have to do with his peculiar style. There is a lot of setup, to the point where we don’t actually get on the ship and are introduced to Veesey’s two male companions until at least a quarter in; but then you might argue we need the setup, or else what follows will not make any damn sense to us. I will say, this really should not be your first Smith or Instrumentality story. I would recommend starting with “Scanners Live in Vain” or “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” or maybe “The Burning of the Brain.” For one, Smith mentions the Scanners offhandedly at the beginning of “Think Blue, Count Two,” and if this is your first Smith story then you would have no clue what a Scanner is, because Smith doesn’t explain it. In fact there is a lot that Smith can’t be bothered to explain, whether it be the jargon or mechanics of his future history. It also doesn’t help that despite psychology figuring very much into the workings of the Instrumentality universe (yeah, you’ve got psi powers and the like), we don’t get much insight into how characters think or how they mentally interact with this strange world around them. As such, there is no singular one-size-fits-all Instrumentality story; but on the plus side, the more of this series you read, the more rewarding it becomes, since these stories piggyback off each other.

Now, Veesey is put in cold sleep and sent aboard, along with 30,000 other passengers. The ship is maintained by the sailor along with a team of robots, but while the robots can do a great deal, a very small number of passengers will have to be awakened if the sailor were to die or become incapacitated. So of course, in seemingly no time at all, the sailor dies; whether it be suicide or an accident is not revealed until later. Veesey thus wakes up, along with two male passengers, the young and handsome Trece and the older and deformed (something had gone wrong with his cryo-chamber) Talatashar. The humans enter and awaken from cold sleep periodically (it would seem like days to them while centuries pass by outside the ship) to help with issues the robots are unable to deal with themselves. That’s the idea. Since this is a story and a story typically requires drama, though, the humans run into problems that are unrelated to the ships—namely that while machinery might be running fine, there’s always the chance for human error and human folly. There’s also the problematic aspect of the equation, which is that every adult (who are bare minimum a decade older than her) wants to get in Veesey’s pants, despite her very young age. I wanna say this sort of thing only happens in this one Smith story, but I’m also thinking of the questionable age-gap relationship at the heart of “On the Storm Planet,” which otherwise is one of Smith’s best. Granted that nothing explicit happens on the page (because this is still magazine SF in the early ’60s), it doesn’t take long for Veesey and Trece to start a sexual relationship.

There Be Spoilers Here

While Veesey and Trece’s relationship progresses, Talatashar becomes kind of an incel, resenting Veesey’s casual pull on his male friend. The result is jealousy that heightens into Talatashar entering a blind rage and going on a rather Elliot Rodger-esque rant about how women are so purely evil that they’re not even aware of their evilness. Yeah, it would be a comical level of misogyny if not for the fact that we now have guys going on shooting sprees basically because they have some awful personalities that they’re unable to get any pussy. Misogyny is the big catalyst for tensions between the three humans escalating, which I’ll be honest, I did not expect considering Smith was a lot of things, but a feminist was not one of them. (Mind you that while he was definitely a right-winger, Smith wasn’t entirely right-wing: for one he seemed to sympathize with the Civil Rights movement, with the Underpeople [the aforementioned genetically engineered animal-people] clearly being an allegory for a oppressed underclass.) Thankfully Veesey is not in any real danger, since all she has to do is think of the nursery rhyme that’s been burned into her brain and the dead-alive mouse brain does its job. A series of holograms comes alive and tell Talatashar to quit being such a bitch baby or else they’ll kick his shit in—a threat that, surprisingly, he ends up taking to heart. The holograms, despite being effectively ghosts, are able to trick the humans’ minds so as to make them think these ghostly doings are for real, to the point where Sh’san, the lead hologram, can apparently fire a “gun” at someone’s head and said head would actually be blown to bits. You have to admit that’s pretty cool.

So, all’s well that ends well. The three humans and their 30,000 fellow passengers reach the planet with the ship in one piece. Of course, Trece dumps Veesey, letting her know that it’s actually not too kosher for a 20-something to be dating a 15-year-old. (He says this after they’ve had sex multiple times, but better late than never, I guess.) Talatashar is much more chill now, having gone over his bout of space-induced insanity, and the technicians waiting for them at the immigration station even repaired his face so he looks reasonably handsome now. This is one of those Smith stories that has a straight-up happy ending, which is not something I would suggest getting used to with Smith.

A Step Farther Out

At some point I’m gonna review a Smith story here that involves the Underpeople, who are quite interesting conceptually, although they don’t actually appear in that many Instrumentality stories. The last Smith story I reviewed, “Drunkboat,” had its points but wasn’t very good, in my opinion, although “Think Blue, Count Two” is better. The appeal of Cordwainer Smith lies in the fact that he’s one of the best and most eccentric old-timey SF writers when it comes to space opera, or more generally space adventure. “Scanners Live in Vain” does not read like any other space adventure story of the time, and similarly “Think Blue, Count Two” takes what is basically a love triangle IN SPAAAAACE and puts a novel spin on it. This is the kind of story you should check out once you’ve become at least a bit acclimated with the Instrumentality series.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” by R. A. Lafferty

July 11th, 2025

(Cover by Dember. Galaxy, December 1962.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve been meaning to dig more into R. A. Lafferty’s early work, which is the stuff that tends to get overlooked when I see people evaluating his legacy. Lafferty is pretty divisive among readers, probably more so today than half a century ago: either you’re a fan of his stuff or you ain’t. I’m not a fan myself, really, but I’ll try anything once (or even twice). In the case of Lafferty it’s mainly because he’s Quirky™ that he has a love-him-or-hate-him reputation, although this same quirkiness also threw him into the midst of the New Wave, despite being politically and socially conservative and also already middle-aged, being about a generation older than most of his fellow New Wavers. He appeared in Dangerous Visions, because of course he did. He was also one of the most frequent contributors to Damon Knight’s Orbit series. Lafferty had made his debut in the late ’50s, but not many people know this. Also, I should mention that this will be a shorter review than usual, both because “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” is very short and also because there’s not much I can say about it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in the Lafferty collection Strange Doings, and has fallen out of copyright, so it’s on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

The tragedy of the situation is that Manuel is too thorough at his job, which is not the same thing as being good at one’s job. The state authorities hire Manuel as a census taker, which (the narrator tells us upfront) is a decision that will lead to the deaths of thousands. We’re basically told how the story will end at the beginning, but are not given context. The official who gives Manuel his job tells him to count all the people in the Santa Magdalena (which as far as I can tell is not a real place), a little mountain area on the outskirts of High Plains, Texas. The job should’ve been an easy one, since there aren’t many people in that area—or at least there aren’t many normal people. Unfortunately, Manuel knows something that the official does not. “The official had given a snap judgement, and it led to disaster. It was not his fault. The instructions are not clear. Nowhere in all the verbiage does it say how big they have to be to be counted as people.” So Manuel takes his mule, named Mula, into the desert, and three days later he returns to High Plains, his papers filled with names—thousands of them. Thousands more than there should be. Also, quite strangely, Manuel and his mule seem to have aged by decades, despite not being gone nearly that long. Manuel claims he had aged 35 years while doing the census, and he might be right about that. He also seems to have shrunk in size, to the size of—well, it’s a slur that Lafferty uses, which I will not repeat here.

There’s a large cratr near High Plains, about the size of where a small town might’ve been, and the crater (nobody knows what caused it) had long since been christened as Sodom. Now, Lafferty knew his Bible, and even if you don’t then you should still figure that if there’s a Sodom, there must also be a Gomorrah. These are the twin cities of the plain that God decided to blow to kingdom come, on account of their collective wickedness. The author (or maybe authors) of Genesis did not make it clear just what it was that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were guilty of, but a common historical interpretation is that they indulged a little too much in old-fashioned sodomy—you know that’s where the word comes from. Of course, Lafferty is being ironic, since the people of High Plains and whatever Sodom used to be are not guilty of any crime worthy of a Biblical smackdown; but rather these people fall victim to a classic bureaucratic fuck-up. You could say it was a little misunderstanding. The problem is that Manuel knew about the little people who lived in the Santa Magdalena; by little we mean about the size of action figures, or Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians. Manuel, who we’re told is quite stupid (he is apparently illiterate and can’t read a map), respects the little people, but irks them something fierce when he tries counting them as part of the census. Hilarity ensues.

How much you like Lafferty will depend on your own sense of humor, as well as if you can get behind his callousness as well as his religious ferocity. There’s an immense sadism in a lot of Lafferty’s writing, which is sometimes played for laughs, such as here, as well as the last Lafferty story I reviewed, “The Transcendent Tigers.” “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” is not as good as “The Transcendent Tigers,” for one because it’s not as funny, but also I feel like Lafferty has less of a point to make. The former is so short that we barely have time to understand any of these characters, and Lafferty doesn’t escalate the catastrophe like he does in his best/funniest work. I would describe this story as “cute,” which is to say it has the same energy as a decent joke that makes you exhale from your nostrils but doesn’t actually make you laugh. I do sometimes wonder why Lafferty had such a sadistic streak, but then again virtually every Catholic writer I know has a perverted preoccupation when it comes to death and human suffering. I’ve also seen criticisms of Lafferty for having misogynistic tendencies, but since there aren’t any female characters of note here, there is at least that.

There Be Spoilers Here

Manuel dies, seemingly from a mix of rapid aging and having lost his marbles, which then has the perspective change to that of Marshal, the census chief of High Plains. One night Marshal gets a visitor in the form of one of the little people, although Marshal’s not totally convinced it isn’t a hallucination. The little guy is upset about Manuel’s census list and wants it back, but it’s too late. The truth is that what had caused Sodom was that the people who lived there (this was a few hundred years ago, so says the little dude) had found out about the little people. The whole town had been blown up, from what the little dude reveals to be some kind of explosive “the size of a grain of sand.” Marshal does not take the warning seriously and—well, you already know the rest. The change in perspectives bugged me a bit, being that this is such a short story, and also there’s the fact that the back end suddenly becomes heavy on dialogue compared to the rest of it. The result almost reads like a rough draft.

A Step Farther Out

“Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” is both early and minor Lafferty, in that it’s good for a chuckle but not much else. I suspect Fred Pohl accepted it because he liked it enough, and because of its lenght he thought it would be a good little piece to fill out an issue. Back in the days before online magazines, it was common practice to accept minor stories for the sake of filler, which is not something online magazine editors have to think about. There’s filler by the usual suspects when it comes to this sort of thing, but then there’s also filler by major writers. Lafferty was not a major writer yet in 1962, but he was on his way there.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Arcturus Times Three” by Jack Sharkey

July 8th, 2025

(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Galaxy, October 1961.)

Who Goes There?

In the history of genre SF there are many ships that pass in the night, never to be seen or heard from again, one of these being Jack Sharkey. Sharkey had made his debut at the tail end of the ’50s and wrote a pretty considerable amount of short fiction over the next half-dozen years. For reasons I’m not sure about, because we don’t know much about Sharkey, he more or less disappeared from the field after 1965. As far as I can make out writing SF was just a temporary side gig for him, which is strange since he was most active at a time when the US magazine market was at low tide, with the bubble having burst in the back end of the ’50s. Even the SF Encyclopedia doesn’t have much to say about him. Nearly every genre outlet at the time bought his stuff, though, which means he must’ve made some impression. He also had a series of short stories that caught my attention, about a “space zoologist” named Jerry Norcriss, at a time when zoology and generally the study of animal life were still rather novel in modern SF. “Arcturus Times Three” is the first entry in this series.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in Uncollected Stars (ed. Piers Anthony, Martin H. Greenberg, Barry N. Malzberg, and Charles G. Waugh). The copyright ran out, so it’s on Project Gutenberg. Surprisingly there was never a book collecting all of the Jerry Norcriss stories.

Enhancing Image

By the year 2097, man has voyaged to the stars, going where no one has gone before, to seek out new life and new civilizations, yadda yadda. However, making first contact in-person with intelligent life has proven to be a hefty gamble, perhaps heavy enough that a scientific alternative was called for; that alternative is the Space Zoologist, making capital-C Contact with alien life via telepathic mind-link, in which the zoologist will spend forty minutes at minimum inside the mind of an alien creature, walking (or slithering, or swimming) around in that creature’s shoes, sharing their brain, with the creature and zoologist’s personalities having a tug-of-war over the body. The catch, of course, is that if the creature were to die in those forty minutes, the zoologist dies with them, their body being a mindless husk. Why is this so? Well, the real reason is that otherwise there would be no potential bodily harm for the zoologist and thus your story would become boring rather quickly. Meet Jerry Norcriss, thirty-year-old Space Zoologist as well as space lieutenant, IN SPAAAAAACE. The mission is to survey some local wildlife on Arcturus Three, although the exact reason for this is not given until the end, so best not to think about it. The point is to stick Jerry’s mind in the heads of three random lifeforms, which he will not know anything about in advance and who are very likely to die within those forty minutes. Sounds simple enough, right?

I have a few issues. One has to think the mortality rate for Space Zoologist must be ridiculous, to the point where it might be more costly than to have a survey team come down and bring the party to the aliens. It also doesn’t occur to any of these people that sending robots would be preferable; surely it was not a novel idea, in 1961, to use robotic probes instead of humans to explore hostile environments. But then we wouldn’t have a story. At the same time, wouldn’t it make sense for the space crew to figure out some way to, I dunno, figure out what kind of lifeform Jerry would be sharing a head with in advance. It’s a shame, because the idea is a neat one, which borders on transhumanism. As the narrator tells us, “A man who has been an animal has infinitely more knowledge of that animal than a man who has merely dissected one.” Jerry’s interest in alien biology goes to a point where he doesn’t relate much to his fellow humans, and what little we find out about his character in this story (I assume we learn more in future entries, but not that much given the episodic nature of the whole thing) is just about enough to make us relate to him. I mean fuck, I don’t like hanging out with people that much either. With that said, this is not a cerebral or personal story, but an old-fashioned scientific adventure of the sort that would become increasingly rare as the ’60s progressed—or so retrospective views on the genre’s history would have it seem. Evidently there was still a sizable audience for this sort of thing.

As for the animals that Jerry takes control of, there’s a bit of variety between the three of them (get it, because it’s like a pun with the title, Arcturus Three and there being three animals…), with the first being this weird centipede creature that’s connected to another animals via its tongue; then there’s the most compelling sequence, where Jerry’s in the body of a “lion-thing,” somewhere between a lion and a bear, with its cub. The lion-thing’s instinctive behavior turns out to be as much that of a lemming’s as a lion’s, including a tendency to eat things that are very not good for it. Not that Jerry would know until he finds his tummy hurts real bad, on account of not being able to survey the territory beforehand. LIKE THEY SHOULD’VE FUCKING DONE. The only reason he gets out of it in one piece is having to do with time dilation, or rather Sharkey has his thumb on the scales so as to make sure his hero gets out okay. (In fairness, time would work differently on another planet. You say forty minutes, but how much is forty minutes on a planet that has a different gravity and rotation from Earth’s?) It’s all in good fun. We even get some fully intelligent aliens thrown into the mix, although their role is tertiary enough that one is quick to forget about them. This is a story where the journey matters much more than the destination, although I’m not sure if the journey was worth it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The most interesting part of this whole thing for me was the ending, which, after some rather lightweight planetary adventuring, reckons with a serious problem—that being the problem of colonization and the ensuing (and inevitable) ecological damage. On top of his awkwardness around people, Jerry feels more than a hint of shame about contributing to what will be a protracted and brutal colonization effort, in which the aforementioned animals will be displaced or killed outright, yet he also feels powerless to do anything about what is ultimately a systemic issue. He loves his job, and yet he doesn’t like what it costs for life in the universe. As the narrator says, clearly reflecting Jerry’s (and probably Sharkey’s) feelings, “People always were puzzled about how a Space Zoologist could stand being a creature other than a human being. And Space Zoologists always were puzzled about how a human being could stand being part of that conquering race called man.” I wish the rest of the story had something like this degree of seriousness, but it’s too little and a bit too late.

A Step Farther Out

I sat around for a couple days trying to organize my thoughts on this, which when such a thing happens is either from too much or too little material; in the case of “Arcturus Times Three” it’s the latter. Sharkey’s a competent storyteller with a clear interest in a certain science, but given how long this story is (it’s a solid novelette), it’s not quite enough meat on its bones. The alien creatures Sharkey describes are neat enough, but I got this consistent and burdensome feeling of wanting more, on top of the fact that I was much slower about reading this than I should’ve been. If I’m taking several breaks during your story that I should’ve been able to read in an hour or so, then something is definitely missing.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Something Bright” by Zenna Henderson

July 4th, 2025

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, February 1960.)

Who Goes There?

Our first ’60s Galaxy story for this retrospective is by someone who actually did not appear in Galaxy often. The last time I covered Zenna Henderson it was as part of a retrospective on F&SF, the magazine which seemed to be Henderson’s preferred outlet. Henderson made her debut in 1952, as part of a wave of female writers who would help shape ’50s SF as being a very different ball game from the previous decade—indeed also the decade to come after, since there wouldn’t be as many active female SFF writers in the ’60s. Henderson specialized in short fiction, and one reason she lost traction by the end of the ’60s is that she refused to change her tune with the market; her single “novel,” Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, is a fix-up. Given her day job as a schoolteacher, it makes sense that her fiction tends to focus on relationships between adults (specifically parents and teachers) and children, with children especially getting attention, which for the time was novel. SF at the time was, let’s say averse to understanding the day-to-day lives of children, but Henderson’s fiction was a major exception. Today’s story, “Something Bright,” is a standalone work (Henderson’s fiction can be split into two groups: standalone stories and those about “The People”) that I found a good deal more compelling than “Subcommittee,” the last Henderson story I reviewed. This is a good one, and it’s understandably one of her more reprinted stories.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1960 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in The 6th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F (ed. Judith Merril), The Seventh Galaxy Reader (ed. Frederik Pohl), Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, and Frederik Pohl), and the Henderson collections The Anything Box and Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson.

Enhancing Image

The exact year is not given, but right away we’re told that “Something Bright” takes place during “the Depression,” so probably anywhere between 1930 and 1935. Anna is an adult now, but she’s telling us about a strange thing that happened to her when she was eleven years old, living in a “court” that her family shared with an older couple, the Klevitys. Mr. Klevity isn’t around (in fact he doesn’t appear until the story’s end), but Mrs. Klevity is, especially whenever Anna’s mom has to go out for errands. Obviously there is something off about the Klevitys, not least because they somehow have fresh eggs every morning, in an economy where even eggs are treated as a delicacy. The SFnal twist is by itself easy to detect in advamce, to the point where it hardly even counts as a twist; but it’s what Henderson does around the twist that makes it a pretty good story. As such I’m gonna work on the assumption that you, the reader, have already figured out that the Klevitys are aliens in disguise, become come on, we’re all adults here, and the fact that Henderson waits until the back end to confirm our suspicions is merely a formality. This is a story about childhood and memory, far more than it is a story about aliens, yet the SFnal element is integral to its makeup. Both in style and substance it would strike the average reader as “literary”—except for the part about the aliens, of course.

The key ingredient that elevates “Something Bright” is the sense that while it is not autobiographical at face value, there is the strong sense that Henderson is writing about personal experiences that she herself probably had first-hand knowledge of. I’m not sure how much Henderson and Anna share in terms of personality, but we do know that they both spent at least some of their formative years during the Depression, and incidentally each is an older child in a family with five kids. When Henderson/Anna asks at the beginning, “Do you remember the Depression?” she’s being at least partly rhetorical: she absolutely does remember. Despite being only about a dozen pages, the setting is vividly set, with Anna lamenting being the eldest of five kids in a home that amounted to two rooms, in which nobody had any privacy, least of all her mother. We’re not told directly what happened with Anna’s dad, that I can recall anyway, but at one point it’s implied he either went off in search of work or abandoned the family outright. Anna’s mom is effectively a single parent, but that’s where Mrs. Klevity comes in. It would have been commonplace, during the Depression, for kids to either be left to fend for themselves much of the time or to be kept under watch by multiple people who were not their biological parents—out of economic necessity more than anything. You may remember in To Kill a Mockingbird that Scout and her brother Jem are left to their own devices for way longer than what would nowadays be considered a good idea, on account of their single dad only being able to do so much.

“Something Bright” must’ve struck a cord at the time, on account of being reprinted multiple times within just a few years, but it also speaks to today’s post-COVID environment. The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is, along with the housing market crash of 2008, the closest we have to a modern-day analog to the Great Depression. These are times in which the machinery of capitalism comes almost to a grinding halt, in which the system “failed” (but, on the other hand, if we’re to take capitalism as a system that works to benefit a rich minority at the expense of the majority, then it more or less kept working as intended), and in which even the nuclear family as a viable model for child care seemed on the brink of becoming a thing of the past. Ironically the nuclear family, which conservatives love to hold up as being traditional and “natural,” has, for practical reasons, been in fact a fairly modern phenomenon. The idea that two parents would take care of their own biological kids was unviable for many during the Depression, during which you’d be lucky if even one of your parents had a steady job, and said job was unlikely to both pay the bills and feed everyone. Thus in this story we’re given a depiction of a nontraditional family setup, in which the father figure is absent and so Anna and her siblings are left with at least one adult figure in their lives who is a constant and yet is not related to them. Mrs. Klevity sticks out in Anna’s memory not just for her strangeness and her conspicuous and yet unexplained ability to provide for both herself and her husband (Anna points out that the Klevitys have three rooms to themselves, compared to Anna’s two), but also the fact that she at least temporarily acted as a surrogate parent.

There Be Spoilers Here

The back end of “Something Bright” takes a turn towards horror, although it doesn’t quite go there, because it turns out Anna is not in any real danger. Her first encounter with Mrs. Klevity without the disguise, which she hears but does not see, is genuinely chilling, not to mention an unexpected bit of restraint of Henderson’s part. We figured in advance that the Klevitys were not strictly speaking human, but how this reveal is made is what makes the twist memorable despite its predictability. That Anna ultimately helps Mrs. Klevity and her husband (who only shows up at the end to find that his wife has flown the coop, so to speak) go back to wherever it is they came from, and gets something material out of it (the Klevitys leave behind their half of the court and bestow it to Anna’s family, in a thank-you note), makes for a pretty upbeat conclusion. Yet despite it being a happy ending, there’s still a strong eeriness about the whole thing, as if Anna, who is telling us this story many years after the fact, is trying to explain some peculiar childhood trauma that had happened to her. I have to wonder what the context could be that Anna is telling this story to us, since this is not the kind of thing you’d tell to just anyone, but this is a quibble. Then again, when you’re looking back on childhood memories, the line between what really happened and one’s own imagination can be hard to separate. I barely remember my own childhood, as an autistic person who also dissociated a lot, to the point where a lot of what I “remember” might not have actually happened. Our own histories become stranger and more disconnected as time passes, to where they no longer seem real to us.

A Step Farther Out

Henderson working with children as part of her day job is very much reflected here, as it captures a genuineness about childhood experience that very few SF stories at the time had even attempted. The twist is obvious, to the point where I don’t even count it as a spoiler really, but the twist is not why we’re here. When I read “Subcommittee” I was ambivalent about its glorifying of the nuclear family, which probably did not read as old-hat in the early ’60s but which now reads as stuffy and too old-fashioned; but “Something Bright” shows us an alternative family dynamic and doesn’t do anything to demonize it. It also helps that Anna is a likable narrator who relates her past experiences such that you get a vivid impression of what her childhood was like, even if you didn’t (and indeed most people in the US don’t now) go through exactly what she did. I recommend it! It’s very good proto-feminist pew-New Wave SF.

See you next time.