(Cover by Robert Fuqua. Amazing Stories, January 1944.)
What a year, huh? And we just started.
Since a lot of us are snowed in, or at least dealing with some pesky snow and ice (and ICE) in the midst of our everyday activities, we may as well pass the time by cozying up with some good reading. Or maybe not so good. Truth be told, I’m not so sure about the quality of what I’ll be tackling this month, with maybe one exception, the short story. Why yes, it’s been a while (a couple years) since I reviewed and quite enjoyed Philip José Farmer’s story “Mother,” which you may remember as being strange and pretty risqué for early 1950s SF. Farmer did write a sequel, “Daughter,” which from what I’ve heard is just as good if not better. As for choosing the obligatory item from Amazing Stories, to celebrate that magazine’s centennial, I decided to pick something from the rather neglected and maligned ’40s period. At the same time, Ross Rocklynne is not just some hack writer, so we’ll see. It had also been, for my money, too long since I’d scavenged the pages of If, namely for a serialized novel or novella, of which many were published in that magazine. For February it’s all sci-fi and all retro.
Now, there is an announcement I’d been wanting to make here, and maybe should have with last month’s review forecast, but now is as good a time. I recently launched a sister blog on Substack, Sketches from a Reader’s Album, which is not focused on genre fiction at all (although genre fiction will inevitably figure into it on occasion), but is like SFF Remembrance a review blog with the occasional editorial. At least that’s the idea. There I’ll be writing about literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, namely books that have won the National Book Award. (The National Book Award is sort of like to the Pulitzer Prize what the Nebula is to the Hugo, if you care for that sort of thing.) With both sites you can expect only so many posts a month, but they’ll be lengthy and hopefully entertaining.
As far as time frames go, we have one story from the 1940s, one from the 1950s, and one from the 1960s. Because I’ll be covering stories published in Amazing Stories in the 1920s and ’30s, we unfortunately will not be getting to more recent stuff until April at the earliest.
For the serial:
Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown. Serialized in If, April to July 1966. Such a collaboration sounds out of the blue, and honestly I’m not even sure how or why Laumer and Brown came together to work on a novel. But it’s not totally unexpected. Laumer and Brown made their debuts at almost the exact same time, at the tail end of the ’50s, and both were prolific during the pre-New Wave years. They were also very close in age. Sadly Brown died at just 41 years old in 1967, one year after Earthblood was published, while Laumer suffered a stroke in 1971 which left him unable to write for a time. I know little about Earthblood aside from it being an adventure novel, of the sort that was common in If in the ’60s.
For the novella:
“Intruders from the Stars” by Ross Rocklynne. From the January 1944 issue of Amazing Stories. Retro Hugo finalist for Best Novella. Rocklynne is one of those unexpected survivors from the pre-Campbell years, having made his debut in 1935 when he was just 22, and continuing up to the early ’50s before going on hiatus. (Like too many SF writers of his generation he became interested in Dianetics.) He eventually made a comeback in the late ’60s, and even appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions. Despite the Retro Hugo nomination, “Intruders from the Stars” has almost never been reprinted.
For the short story:
“Daughter” by Philip José Farmer. From the Winter 1954 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The SF market in the early ’50s was such that you could get your story published even if it was more daring than average, provided you accepted selling to one of the second-rate magazines. By 1954, Farmer had already become notorious for his novella “The Lovers,” about a sexually explicit (for the time) romance between an Earthman and an alien woman who is more bug-like than she appears. Early Farmer is pulpy in style, but he can be rather big and provocative with his ideas.
(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, February 1927.)
The Story So Far
Bedford and Cavor are a failed businessman and an eccentric scientist respectively, who strike up an unlikely friendship and business partnership. Cavor, being the inventor, perfects a metal of his own design which he christens Cavorite, while Bedford orchestrates the construction (not the invention, of course) of a giant metal sphere which takes advantage of this anti-gravity metal called Cavorite. To test the viability of this new metal, after an accident gets nearly the both of them killed, Cavor and Bedford agree (reluctantly on Bedford’s part) to take this big metal ball to the moon. They pack some provisions, although strangely (from a modern standpoint) it doesn’t occur to them to build pressure suits for a world which very well might not even have an atmosphere. But of course, in the year 1899, it was speculated that the moon might not only have an atmosphere, but be home to life of its own. And so it does here.
Of course, nearly everything that could go wrong does, short of the two men dying straightaway. They lose track of the sphere, finding that it had been stolen or sunken into the landscape. They eventually battle hunger and thirst, although due to the lower gravity it takes longer for their bodily functions to call upon them. The biggest issue becomes the moon’s indigenous intelligent race, a bunch of “ant-men,” some of whom are man-sized, and somewhat humanoid, but otherwise have nothing in common with the men. These aliens, which Cavor comes to call Selenites, live in a complex network of underground caverns, and since the plant life on the moon isn’t useful for crafting wood-based equipment, Selenite civilization is metal-based, the moon apparently being rich in metals. At the end of the second installment Bedford and Cavor decide to split up in search of the sphere, leaving a handkerchief as a landmark.
Enhancing Image
The plan doesn’t go well at all, although the bright side is that Bedford finds the sphere and is able to leave the moon, albeit without Cavor. Unfortunately the two will never see each other again, although this is not the last time they hear from each other. In what I can only think of as a major contrivance, Bedford lands in the UK, in the seaside town of Littlestone, which is quite lucky for him. He loses the sphere again, for the last time it seems, but he’s able to make some money off of publishing the story of his and Cavort’s journey to the moon. (Funnily enough Bedford’s story appears in The Strand Magazine, which is also where The First Men in the Moon first appeared in the UK.) Normally this would be where the story (as in this novel) ends, but eventually a scientist by the name of Julius Wendigee, a Dutchman living in Britain, “who has been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some method of communication with Mars,” picks up coded messages from the moon. Bedford gets in on this, having hitherto assumed Cavor was dead, seeing that his former buddy is not only alive but in contact with the Selenites. This is good news!
The back end of the novel is a series of transcripts of Cavor explaining Selenite culture and biology, among other things. Bedford effectively disappears as a character while Cavor takes control, relating his story to us like the unnamed protagonist does in The Time Machine. I must admit that these last few chapters are my favorite part of the book, which is a shame considering that, by Bedford’s own admission, the story had already come to an end in one sense, but also it feels like too little and too late. We learn important details about life for the Selenites that we really should’ve been given insight to earlier in the book, since up this point they came off as generic hostile aliens. The novel is at its best when it stops being an adventure narrative and instead swerves into territory Wells is better with, namely speculation on the future of human civilization. Cavor is led into an impossibly grand hall and introduced to the ruler of the Selenites, the Grand Lunar, an immobile mass of flesh whose brain is literally several yards across. (Intelligence among the Selenites is determined by the size of their heads, at the cost of body strength and mobility. This is something that became a cliche in pulp-era SF, but it was not so in Wells’s time.) It’s here that we finally get what the point of the book seems to be—a point that Wells had rather neglected to explore up till now.
There’s a big case of culture clash between the humans (or at least humanity as told by Cavor) and Selenites, indeed every facet of culture there is. The Selenites, in keeping with their insectoid appearance, are a race of specialized workers with a single absolute ruler, although the Grand Lunar represents supreme intelligence rather than supreme fertility like a queen bee. There’s no war here, nor does there seem to be poverty. Despite their reliance on metal, the Selenites are pre-industrials. The evil and filth of Victorian England has not reached them. Unfortunately, in trying to describe life on Earth, Cavor can’t help but yap about the nastier parts of human nature and act as if these are just things one ought to expect, namely the human tendency to wage war. This understandably concerns the Selenites, and Cavor’s fate is left ambiguous, although it doesn’t look good for him. Regardless, we never hear from Cavor again. There’s an anti-war slant crammed into the climax of the novel, which I can’t help but take as hypocritical on Wells’s part, considering he would later support British involvement in World War I. (Wells was, among other things, a hypocrite: he was a womanizer, even fathering a child out of wedlock, while at the same time being prudish about sex in literature, like the good Victorian gentleman he was.) The climax is good on its own, but if only the rest of the novel had properly built up to it.
A Step Farther Out
When C. S. Lewis wrote Out of the Silent Planet he intended it as a not-very-subtle rebuke of Wells’s writing, and The First Men in the Moon in particular. For what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of either novel. I don’t think The First Men in the Moon plays to Wells’s strengths, for the most part. It’s a weirdly structured thing that feels lopsided and at times bloated, despite coming to only about 200 pages in paperback. It’s a simple idea that could’ve worked better had it been the length of The Time Machine, or even The Invisible Man. Wells, who was never one to hide his beliefs, is less didactic here than in those other novels, but I wish he maybe didn’t bury the lede with what he wanted to say. The First Men in the Moon is actually less didactic than Lewis’s novel, but that’s not really a positive for the former. Maybe I would like it more had I read it as a book, in a short burst of time, rather than stretch it out over a few weeks, but I’m not sure.
(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, January 1927.)
The Story So Far
Bedford is an aspiring playwright and a failed businessman who strikes up an unlikely friendship with the scientist Cavor. Bedford is working on a play whilst licking some financial wounds and Cavor has been trying to perfect a metal of his own design, so that each man has been struggling with his own goals. Their friendship takes on a business aspect, with Bedford basically acting as Cavor’s manager while the latter messes around with the elements and God knows what. Because this novel is narrated from Bedford’s perspective and because Bedford himself is not a scientist at all, the details of how Cavorite is perfected are rather sketchy. It’s a combination of metals that works like helium, despite being solid, in that it has an anti-gravity effect. The accidental perfecting of this man-made element results in a cyclone that damn near kills Our Heroes™, but the good news is that it works. The question then becomes what to do with Cavorite. Mind you Wells wrote the novel around 1899, the years it takes place, so airplanes were just a little bit off in the future, with hot air balloons being up to this point the only practical way man could take flight.
Cavor gets the “brilliant” notion to not only construct a giant metal sphere made partly of Cavorite, but to test it by flying himself and Bedford to the moon. Thus our means of getting to the moon is not via rocket ship, or even like Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon where we’re shot out of a cannon, but what amounts to an anti-gravity metal sphere. How these two Englishmen plan on getting back to Earth, let alone England, remains to be seen. When they land on the moon they find that the air is breathable, if also taking some getting used to, and that there is plant life here at the very least—albeit plant life of an exotic sort. The gravity is also only a fraction of Earth’s, which Bedford struggles with. And yet despite the breathable atmosphere there doesn’t seem to be any alien life possessing anything like human intelligence… at least so far.
Enhancing Image
The second installment opens with Bedford and Cavor actually stepping out of the sphere and getting a whiff of that comparatively thin moon air. I need not tell the reader (but I will) that aside from the lower gravity, the moon in Wells’s novel is completely different from the moon as we know it—so different that it may as well be a fantasy realm. What was scientifically plausible in 1901 was very much not so even a few decades later, never mind in 2026. If The First Men in the Moon suffers from anything, aside from being heavier on the adventure elements than Wells’s more iconic novels, it’s not being nearly as plausible as The Time Machine or The Island of Dr. Moreau. Granted that all science fiction is founded on at least one big lie (and more likely several lies in concert), The First Men in the Moon now almost reads more like fantasy than SF. It’s more scientifically grounded than Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels, but not by a whole lot. What’s interesting is how the atmosphere and gravity affect Bedford and Cavor’s sense of time and even hunger, with them realizing after a while that they’d not eaten in hours, yet don’t feel like they’re starving. It’s also easy (and fun) to traverse the moon by jumping around. The only problem (well, the first problem) is that they at some point lose track of the sphere.
It takes nearly halfway through the novel, but it does live up to its title. I said that the moon here is radically different from how it is in real life, another difference being that the moon here has a vast network of underground tunnels. Not only is the moon alive, with plants and “mooncalves” to serve as livestock, but there is indeed a race of intelligent beings here. The Selenites are about man-sized and bipedal, but insectoid. More to the point, there’s no overlap in language between the Englishmen and the aliens, except maybe basic body language. The Selenites don’t intend to kill them, at least not right away, instead taking them prisoner and holding them in this underground cavern. This isn’t quite as cool as it sounds. It could be because Bedford and Cavor, while being eccentric (especially the latter), are not natural-born adventurers like John Carter or Conan, but much of the conflict in this stretch of the novel comes down to Our Heroes™ bickering with each other rather than working together to fight their captors. Not that there’s anyone else around to converse with. Even the human cast of The Time Machine is bigger, by virtue of the framing narrative. Something I’ve just noticed about protagonists in Wells’s stories, be it his novels or short stories, is that a) they’re not given to introspection, b) they’re reacting to strange happening, rather than causing them, and c) they’re always dudes, without fail. When I say “protagonist” I also mean the narrator, since there tends to be a secondary character, the deuteroganist, who acts rather than reacts. Cavor is thus the deuteroganist to Bedford’s protagonist.
A Step Farther Out
Wells was not known for writing long novels, but even being about the same length as The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon feels smaller in scale and less intellectual. We’re two thirds of the way in and the Selenites are still mostly a mystery. I can’t help but feel like this novel is missing something Wells’s best novels have, although I can’t quite put my finger on it. I’m gonna wait until the final stretch to pass judgment, but this is not looking to be one of my favorites of his. Oh well.
(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, December 1926.)
Who Goes There?
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 and died in 1946, meaning he lived to see both World Wars, as well as the dropping of the first nuclear bombs. By the end of his life he came to believe humanity was in a pretty sorry state, but for much of his career he could be considered an optimist. He was an early advocate for Darwin’s theory of evolution and was what we’d now call a democratic socialist, both of these beliefs playing major roles in his fiction writing. While he wrote essays and articles prolifically, and wrote quite a bit of non-genre fiction, it’s his SF that secured his legacy. Between 1895 and 1901 alone he either invented or codified multiple subgenres of SF, between a handful of novels and a fair number of short stories. That his output became increasingly sporadic and lacking in vitality after that point is a relatively small price to pay, given the heights of his major work. He’s arguably the most important SF writer to ever live, even taking into account authors who wrote SF before him, such as Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. The First Men in the Moon was first published in book form in 1901 and is perhaps Wells’s last major novel, although he did write some very good short stories after this point.
Starting my Amazing Stories run with a reprint might seem odd for those who are not in the know, but reprints played a big role in the first years of that magazine’s history. Hugo Gernsback quickly became infamous for not paying his writers in a timely fashion, and the original work he received was often of pretty dire quality anyway. Therefore, reprints of classic (from the perspective of the 1920s) SF sounded like a logical choice. The relationship between Gernsback and Wells eventually soured, but it’s hard to come across an early issue that doesn’t feature a Wells short story or novel in serial form. There was a generation of young readers who, lacking in hardcover books, associated Wells with Amazing Stories and those colorful Frank R. Paul covers, and that’s not a bad thing.
Placing Coordinates
First serialized from 1900 to 1901 in The Cosmopolitan and The Strand Magazine, in the US and UK respectively. It was first published in book form in 1901. It was serialized in Amazing Stories from December 1926 to February 1927. Obviously it’s still very much in print, but because it’s public domain it’s also on Project Gutenberg.
Enhancing Image
Wells is famous for a lot of things, but his protagonists (except maybe the unnamed hero of The Time Machine) are not among them. Here we have Mr. Bedford, a businessman who’s recently come into hard times by way of bankruptcy. He’s the narrator of this story, but it’s hard to call him a hero; on the bright side, he’s at least affable. Bedford’s chosen to put his money issues aside for the moment and concentrate on writing a play. During this retreat he has a series of encounters with Mr. Cavor, who turns out to be an eccentric scientist. Cavor is mildly and passively annoying, and when Bedford makes this known to him Cavor threatens to buy his bungalow. The two men come to an understanding, though, and even start a business relationship that might evolve into friendship. It’s a case of how opposites might attract, since Bedford is “practical” and business-minded while Cavor, despite being highly intelligent, has yet to make much of a living off of his inventions. His latest invention might prove profitable, though, being an artificial element called Cavorite, which is missing an ingredient. The making of Cavorite is rather vague, with Bedford, himself far from being a scientist, not knowing “the particulars” of its final (and accidental() making. The basic idea is that Cavorite is an anti-gravity amalgamation of metals, in that it’s like helium but a solid rather than a gas. It’s worth mentioning that Wells wrote The First Men in the Moon just prior to the first modern plane taking flight, and the novel itself is set at the very end of the Victorian era. The only practical way a man could take flight in 1899 was with the hot air balloon, which of course is mentioned.
Also mentioned is Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, which in case you don’t know involves a bunch of adventurers building a huge fucking gun and firing themselves out of it, their capsule being like a bullet. It’s pretty hard to take seriously nowadays, not that Wells’s solution to the moon problem is much better. Cavorite is a made-up element that may as well be magic, and the ship the two men (with the help of some laborers) build is a sphere made partly of this element. It’s not really a rocket ship, but rather an anti-gravity ship. Maybe the most unserious part is that Bedford and Cavor are not astronauts, which goes without saying, but also they don’t bring any equipment that even a child nowadays would understand as required for space travel. No pressure suits in this novel. The men also don’t experience the ill effects of low or zero gravity. We really didn’t know anything about our moon in 1899, did we? There’s speculation that the moon might have a breathable atmosphere (it doesn’t) and even life (not that either). Of course, since this is a Wells novel, the air is perfectly breathable and some of the first things we see are flowers indigenous to the moon.
But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.
It’s hard to spoil this novel, since even having not read it before I’m aware of the general trajectory of its plot. We wait until nearly a third into it to witness the revelation of life on the moon, but this fact is made apparent even on the covers of some modern editions. Like with Wells’s other famous works, it suffers nowadays from seeming too familiar, although not to the level of, say, The War of the Worlds. It doesn’t help that Wells is big on using archetypes for his characters, so that Bedford and Covar are about one step above the level of cardboard. The stakes are also low, or at least so it appears at this point, since Our Heroes™ only decide to journey to the moon as a sensational way of testing the sphere. You may then be wondering what the appeal of reading Wells in [the current year] might be, if the science is laughably outdated and his characters lack the dimensions found in the works of Wells’s more literary contemporaries. The secret is that Wells, at his best or even just close to it, is a pretty engrossing storyteller. Wells is like his close contemporaries Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, in that a) he wrote a fair amount of SF and horror, and b) he had a knack for titillating the reader’s imagination. Despite not much happening in terms of plot with this opening installment, I did read most of it with ease.
There Be Spoilers Here
Well, they do land in the moon, or rather on it.
A Step Farther Out
Funny thing about reading this novel and Wells generally is how one can see his influence on other authors pretty readily, be it on Robert Heinlein or Michael Crichton. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the anti-gravity sphere here was an influence on the reality-warping chamber in Crichton’s Sphere.) As with Wells’s other major novels it can also be better understood as adventure fiction than SF of the more serious/modern sort, even if those authors partly got their game from Wells. The question then is, what happens next? We’ve technically already made first contact, but surely there will be aliens that can converse with a couple of Englishmen.
(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, February 1927.)
Since it’s now the new year for everyone, it’s only natural that we have some new things to look forward to or new things to do. I have a few New Year’s resolutions myself: some movies on my watchlist, quite a few video games I hope to get around to playing. I have hundreds of games in my backlog and even more books to be read in my personal library. I have multiple hobbies, which is something I would recommend to everyone. Unfortunately another thing on my to-do list for 2026 is to either get a second job or to try my hand at writing professionally, which would take time away from this hobbies, including this here blog.
Truth be told, I’ve been winding down productivity here for a minute, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’m seemingly incapable of uploading posts “on time” (but of course who’s keeping time except for myself), and I’ve been missing one or even two reviews every month for the past several months. I wouldn’t be too worried, for the few of you who read this, since I’m not gonna be shutting down this site—just lowering my productivity. Granted, for the first couple years I ran this site I was writing at a feverish pace; in hindsight I’ve not really sure how I did that while also having a day job. In 2023 and 2024 I wrote over 200,000 words a year, according to the stats, which is a lot for one person. There was less wordage for 2025, and now for 2026 you can expect fewer posts as well. But this is like being on a flight and going from 20,000 feet to 10,000 feet.
Now, as you may know, Amazing Stories turns 100 this year. It was revived (again) not too long ago as basically a fanzine, but I would like to celebrate Amazing Stories as a professional magazine, which still means going through material that spans seven decades or so. It’s a lot, not helped by the fact that it has a pretty messy history as far as changes in editorship and publisher go. Except for maybe the beginning of its life it always played second fiddle to competing magazines, but it survived (sometimes even thrived) for an impressive stretch of time, given the circumstances. So, every month (except for March, July, and October, where you can expect short-story marathons) I’ll be covering a serial, novella, or short story from the pages of Amazing Stories. This should be interesting.
With the exception of the aforementioned months we’ll be doing only one serial, one novella, and one short story every month from now on, plus at least one editorial. Anyway, we have one story from the 1900s, one from the 1930s, and one from the 1950s.
For the serial:
The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells. Serialized in Amazing Stories, December 1926 to February 1927. First published in 1901. Feel like it would be criminal to pay tribute to Amazing Stories without bringing up Wells at least once, possibly even twice, since he was heavily associated with the magazine in its first few years. Wells himself is arguably the most important SF writer to have ever lived, with his influence being felt to this day practically everywhere you look. Any given SFnal premise likely has its roots in something Wells did over a century ago. This is even more impressive when you consider that Wells at the height of his powers lasted only half a dozen years or so. The First Men in the Moon is one of the last of his classic novels.
For the novella:
“The Gulf Between” by Tom Godwin. From the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Godwin became somewhat famous in SF circles for exactly one story, “The Cold Equations,” which he wrote pretty much in collaboration in John W. Campbell. It might surprise some people that Godwin had in fact written other stuff, and I admit I’m part of the problem because I don’t think I’ve read any Godwin aside from “The Cold Equations.” But I’m gonna fix that. “The Gulf Between” was Godwin’s first story, and it’s notable, if for no other reason than that the cover it inspired would later be reworked as the iconic cover for a certain Queen album.
For the short story:
“The Cairn on the Headland” by Robert E. Howard. From the January 1933 issue of Strange Tales. Over the course of about a dozen years, Howard wrote nonstop for every outlet that would accept his work, and he was not just a fantasy writer, also writing horror, Westerns, sports stories, and non-supernatural adventure pulp. He wrote everything except for SF, which he didn’t seem to have an interest in. Conan the Cimmerian occupied much of Howard’s later years, to the point where he began to resent his creation, but this didn’t stop him from doing standalone yarns like this one.
(Cover by Clarence Doore. Amazing Stories, July 1954.)
Who Goes There?
Philip K. Dick is one of the most important SF authors to ever live, and this is despite dying at 53 with a string of failed marriages and financial hardship left behind him. He was the first genre SF writer to get a Library of America volume, preserving some of his novels with fancy hardcover editions. The Philip K. Dick Award, given annually to the best SF novel first published in paperback, is still going to this day. Stanislaw Lem considered Dick to be the only American SF writer at the time (we’re talking the ’60s and ’70s) worth taking seriously. Whereas most authors would see their reputations taken a dent or two in light of certain transgressions, with Dick his mental illness and bad habits (namely his misogynistic streak and toxic behavior with friends, especially later in his life) are part of the “charm” for Dick fans. Indeed the fact that Dick was a hot mess is the name of the game. But before he became one of the most acclaimed novelists in the field he was one of the most acclaimed (and prolific) short story writers. 121 short stories and novellas, about half of which were written over the span of just a few years. “Breakfast at Twilight” is a Cold War parable, and one of the most solid (he wrote several) that Dick wrote.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1954 issue of Amazing Stories. It was then reprinted in the November 1966 issue of Fantastic. For anthology appearances we have Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wild Years 1946-1955 (ed. Martin H. Greenberg). As for Dick collections there are almost too many to count, but the big one is Second Variety, also titled We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and Other Classic Stories, which is the second in the book series collecting Dick’s short fiction.
Enhancing Image
The McLeans are a normal family who live just outside the city. Tim is an accountant, his wife Mary keeps house, and then there are their three kids, those being their son Earl, along with two daughters whose names are not important enough. One fine morning they’re having breakfast and the kids head off to school, only to discover there’s no school to go to—indeed there doesn’t seem to be anyone around for miles. The sky has also gone dark and the air is thick with a mix of fog and ash. Looks like the McLeans aren’t going anywhere after all, and this ends up being doubly the case when a group of soldiers come knocking at their door. The soldiers, unsure of how a house has remained in this landscape intact, accuse the McLeans of being “geeps” in disguise at first, which is to say Soviet infantry. The Cold War has apparently gone hot, with the Soviets having effectively invaded the US via a mix of “geeps” and “roms,” the latter being “robot operated missiles,” what basically amount to armed drones. The captain of the troops considers burning the whole place down with the McLeans inside, given that they don’t have their papers or their masks; but at the same time the whole situation is so inexplicable that the captain decides to call in a “polic” (a political commissioner) to investigate. The McLeans find that their house has somehow been launched seven years into the future, to the year 1980, three years after the Cold War escalated.
(By the way, the introductory blurb in the story’s original appearance is inaccurate, as it says “a hundred years” into the future. This is way off, which makes me think Dick didn’t write it.)
“Breakfast at Twilight” is a nicely self-contained little piece that honestly reads like it could’ve worked just as well for radio or a half-episode TV episode; that it has apparently never been adapted to another medium is a little perplexing. We get one location plus a small group of characters: the McLeans, the soldiers, and then Douglas the political commissioner. Very Twilight Zone vibes with this one, although it was published five years before that series. Dick’s beige prose style works in his favor, as we waste no time in establishing the premise and what’s at stake, and while most of the dialogue is expositional, it’s a lot to digest in only about a dozen pages. Given that Dick wrote quite a few stories about how the Cold War might escalate, he was kind of a pro at this sort of thing; but whereas “Second Variety” and “The Defenders” are from military points of voice, and “The Minority Report” uses policing as an allegory for the Cold War, “Breakfast at Twilight” is more about how civilians might cope with an American that has been all but torn asunder by bombs and boots on the ground. The future that the McLeans see is not that far from where they once were, and understandably they’re horrified not only by the physical destruction of the environment, but the US sliding into fascism in the name of combatting Soviet communism. Dick’s politics were honestly all over the place, but one thing he remained consistent on was being against McCarthyism and general alarmism when it came to the Soviets. The US of the near-future is not only in shambles but has devolved into a fiercely anti-intellectual and utilitarian culture, in which even certain books have been burned publicly (Douglas suggests Tim ditch the Dostoevsky in his library).
The creepiest part is that we have no clue who is even winning in this war, with the implication that whoever comes out on top will have experienced a pyrrhic victory. Earl, who’s depicted as being the most pro-war of the family (that the rash and naive son would be the most enthusiastic is, of course, a dig at ’50s jingoism), asks the soldiers more than once who is winning in this war, and nobody answers him. It’s a big thing that goes unsaid, and while Dick is not the most subtle of writers, he’s capable of some really insightful moments that cut with a trained surgeon’s precision. Now, we get an explanation for how the McLeans’ house got sent forward (or is it backward?) in time, having to do with radio and nuclear radiation, but it’s a nonsensical “sci-fi” thing that’s only there because it has to be. Dick was not a “hard” SF writer in that he was not concerned with the mechanics, or rather he saw the semblance of mechanics as a means to an end. I would take more issue with the SFnal conceit here being more or less arbitrary if the results weren’t worth it. The dilemma the McLeans then face is whether to go with the soldiers and basically become slave labor for a fascist shithole, but at leasr being safe in the short term, or remaining in the house in the slim hope that it might shuffle back to its original point in time before the Soviets are due to bomb the joint tonight. So you’ve got a bad situation vs. possibly an even worse situation, but the McLeans decide to stay.
There Be Spoilers Here
Tim gathers the family in the basement and the family makes it out by the skin of their teeth, with the house being sent back in time spontaneously just like they’d hoped. This in itself is predictable, because like, either their plan was gonna work or it wasn’t. What happens once Tim and his family emerge from the wreckage of their home (everything above the basement had gotten blasted to shit), is however quite different, and also haunting. See, the problem is that while the family narrowly avoided getting bombed, the war that they suddenly found themselves in is still happening in the future; not only that, but the war has already started. It began years ago, only soon it’s gonna go hot. The war is already happening. We then get a kind of internal monologue from Tim, who may as well be Dick’s mouthpiece in this instance, and it’s a good one:
It’s war. Total war. And not just war for me. For my family. For just my house.
It’s for your house, too. Your house and my house and all the houses. Here and in the next block, in the next town, the next state and country and continent. The whole world, like this. Shambles and ruins. Fog and dank weeds growing in the rusting slag. War for all of us. For everybody crowding down into the basement, white-faced, frightened, somehow sensing something terrible.
It’s an ending that’s not as much of a downer as what happens in “Second Variety,” but it’s no less fatalistic. Imagine living in 2018 and suddenly getting sent to 2025, and having to catch up on… more than a few things. Then you’re sent back to 2018. What would you do? Can you do anything to ease the sense of oncoming horror? On paper it’s a standard ending for this type of story, but it’s elevated by Dick’s unique intensity of paranoia, which captures the borderline apocalyptic feeling people were experiencing in the ’50s and at other points.
A Step Farther Out
Dick wrote quite a few short stories that are gimmicky and/or forgettable, but “Breakfast at Twilight” is not one of those. This is a taut and serious-minded story about a future that was quite possible at the time, and even if the Cold War never escalated to a certain point like Dick feared, it’s a paranoia that speaks to any age in which the government and ruling class could screw everyone over at any moment. We are unfortunately being forced to live in “interesting times.” This is also an effective companion piece to “Second Variety,” arguably more so than with “The Defenders,” which Dick had more explicitly written in tandem with that story. Dick’s stories (same goes for his novels) tend to riff on the same basic ideas over and over, so that they can often be compared with each other.
(Cover by Leo Morey. Amazing Stories, January 1934.)
Who Goes There?
There were once people who loved reading E. E. Smith, but they’re all dead now. Even at the time of his own death in 1965, Edward E. Smith was something of a dinosaur, albeit one treated with reverence within SF fandom, even if he remained totally unknown outside of it. Smith, as you might know, was perhaps the chief innovator of space opera; when his debut novel, The Skylark of Space, was serialized in 1928, there was nothing else quite like it on the market. The closest for comparison would have been Edmond Hamilton’s Interstellar Patrol series, but there was nothing on the scale of what Smith was doing. Unfortunately, to cop a line from Alexei and Cory Panshin’s review of The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, time has long since swallowed up what were once Smith’s virtues—an assessment that I think befits Smith a lot more than Weinbaum, for the record. You can still read and enjoy Weinbaum just fine, assuming you’re not of the sort that requires your SF to be dead serious; but with Smith, even if one were to keep an open mind, it can be a real challenge. Smith just wasn’t a good writer, sad to say, really in any sense of the word, except he did have a sixth sense for scale and action, mostly in the depths of space. Even Hamilton, Smith’s closest contemporary, holds up better to modern scrutiny, especially since he did end up evolving with the times, whereas Smith did not. Thus we have someone whose work strikes even the most retro-friendly of modern SF readers as a museum piece.
Why did I pick Triplanetary as my first Smith to cover here, then? The novelty of it was tempting. You see, along with the Skylark series there was the even grander Lensman series, which occupied Smith for much of the ’30s and ’40s. Smith didn’t see any of his novels get published in book form, however, until after the end of World War II, by which point some of these novels had not seen the light of day since they ran as serials more than a decade earlier. When Smith took hold of Triplanetary for book publication he revised and expanded it so as to make it almost unrecognizable from its serial version, to the point that whereas the serial version of Triplanetary is a standalone novel, the book version was retrofitted to be a prequel entry in the Lensman series. The book version is also about 1.5x the length of the serial version. The two are so different that they have separate ISFDB pages. Like I said, it’s the novelty of the thing.
Placing Coordinates
Triplanetary was serialized in Amazing Stories, January to April 1934. Smith had apparently hoped to sell it to Astounding, but that magazine went through a change in both editor and publisher, not to mention it’d gone on hiatus for about six months. The serial version of Triplanetary would remain stranded there for more than seventy years, until it was transcribed for Project Gutenberg in 2007. A few small publishers have since made this version of the novel available in book form, making sure to differentiate it from its book counterpart.
Enhancing Image
The space liner Hyperion is going on its merry way—or maybe not so merry, as the crew is aware that two ships from the Triplanetary League have gone missing in this part of space recently. Not destroyed, but simply vanished without a trace. (The Triplanetary League is a coalition of Earth, Mars, and Venus, from that distant time when Venus was thought to be hostile to human life, sure, but theoretically livable.) Conway Costigan is First Officer of the Hyperion, but also a member of the Triplanetary Secret Service, so he’s like if Spock and Jason Bourne were the same guy. Unfortunately, a pirate must’ve snuck aboard ship and taken on a disguise, as there’s an outbreak of Vee-Two gas, which incapacitates the crew. Costigan only has enough time to save himself and a single passenger, Clio Marsden, getting them into a lifeboat and reviving her. Costigan explains to Clio that Vee-Two is strictly forbidden, something she apparently already knows. (There’s quite a bit of dialogue wherein characters explain things to each other that they already know.) “The penalty for using it or having it is death on sight. Gangsters and pirates use it, since they have nothing to lose, being on the death list already,” says Costigan. Looking into Smith’s works, the death penalty was something he was just really keen on, to the point where he seemed to support its use even for drug dealers—a view that I wanna say has not aged well, but it looks like modern American conservatives are about as enthusiastic about capital punishment. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Costigan heads back into the bowels of the Hyperion to track down the pirate, with a gas mask, space armor, and a nifty weapon on a tripod that’s so powerful that it not only jibs the pirate but turns him into a cloud of mist. This scene, the strongest in the installment, understandably provides the image for Leo Morey’s cover for the issue.
You can accuse Triplanetary of a lot of things, but it is certainly not slow in its pacing, unless you’re talking about the book version. I’ve gathered that the biggest change Smith made was that he wrote six chapters of backstory to pad out the beginning of the book version, working mainly to wedge Triplanetary into the Lensman continuity. I don’t know how anyone is supposed to survive a single chapter of lore written by E. E. Smith, let alone six. The serial version, for all the bad writing on display, wastes the reader’s time as little as possible. In the course of three chapters we’re introduced to the hero, the (probable) love interest, the villain, and what’s at stake. Speaking of which, when it looks like the Hyperion’s troubles are over, the crew is taken hostage by a ship that appears to be invisible, with Costigan, Clio, and Captain Bradley meeting face to face with the owner of an artificial “planetoid” (listen, it’s not the Death Star, got it?), named Roger. Yes, Roger. That’s his name! We know this is about as old-school a space opera as you can get because tractor beams are mentioned. Roger is a mad scientist, although he considers himself not to be mad but perfectly calm and collected; indeed he doesn’t do a Bond villain laugh or anything like that, but rather is calculated in his malice. Even his threat to rape Clio (I suspect it’s implied rather than explicit because of censorship) is stated in so many words, rather than bluntly put. Much of Roger’s workforce is also robotic, rather than flesh-and-blood people, despite what the pirate in the first chapter would make us believe. Thankfully Costigan, being a badass secret agent, has a plan for getting at least himself and the others out of prison. They escape, thanks to some tech that somehow Roger’s goons were unable to detect, but their victory is short-lived as there turns out to be yet another villain, apparently alien, even bigger of a threat than the mad scientist.
Oh, it’s bad.
Putting his ridiculously bland name aside, Roger’s actually not a bad villain. Smith doesn’t bother much with describing his characters physically, but he does give Roger special treatment:
Not only was [Roger] dressed entirely in gray, but his heavy hair was gray, his eyes were gray, and even his tanned skin seemed to give the impression of grayness in disguise. His overwhelming personality radiated an aura of grayness—not the gentle gray of the dove, but the resistless, driving gray of the super-dreadnaught; the hard, inflexible, brittle gray of the fracture of high-carbon steel.
Mind you that this all happens, with Costigan and company getting attacked by pirates and then introduced to Roger, in the first chapter. If the book version of Triplanetary suffers from being too slow, as in frontloaded with exposition, then the serial version might have the opposite problem. And yet, despite having breakneck pacing, Smith still finds room to insert dialogue that is, let’s say redundant. For example Roger spends rather too much time saying, indirectly, that he plans to make a sex toy out of Clio, if only because she’s apparently too slow on the uptake to get his point. A common criticism I’ve seen when reading about Smith is that his characters don’t talk like real people, or even people you’d read about in SF published a decade later, but almost like old-school comic book characters. It’s writing in the old pulp tradition, although even within that context I’d still say Smith is more stilted than, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who for all his faults went out of his way to not irritate the reader unless one thought about his racism or dodgy science too deeply. Three chapters in and we have one character who feels like he has real presence, except Roger turns out to not even be the greater-scope villain, if the third chapter’s anything to go by.
There Be Spoilers Here
My eyes started glazing over towards the end, although I’m not sure how much of that was the quality of the novel and how much was the awful mood I’ve been in lately. I’ll let you know.
A Step Farther Out
On the one hand I believe that once I start writing about a serial then I really ought to finish it, as I probably will in this case. I’ll be honest with you, though, it’s been rough going already and we’re only a quarter into it. Maybe I just like Smith as a writer; something about him, aside from his obvious faults, bugs me. I tend to be generous with old-timey SF, even of the pre-Campbell sort, but this might be the threshold for me. But, it’s also possible that this is as bad as it gets.
(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, May 1928.)
The Story So Far
London, circa 2100. The world has in some ways changed radically since Wells wrote this story in the 1890s, but in other ways it has not. Class division persists, and has somehow gotten even more pronounced. People, at least in the UK, have mostly abandoned the countryside and huddled together in cities, with the cities becoming more vertically oriented. The richest folks live on the top floors of skyscrapers while the poorest of the lot live on the ground. Denton, an attendant on a commercial flying machine, has love affair with the upper-class young lady Elizabeth, whose father very much disapproves of their courting. The father, Mwres (descended from a man named Morris, an upper-class twit like himself), would prefer his daughter go with Bindon, a colleague of his, and he even hires a hypnotist to wipe Elizbeth’s memory of Denton so that she forgets all about him. Denton eventually undoes the conditioning and the two lovers escape the city, in the hopes that making it in the countryside would be preferable. It’s not really. The end up chapter three, or the first installment, sees the lovers returning to the city, but without much means of enjoying even a middle-class existence. Life will continue to be grueling for a bit yet.
Enhancing Image
The fourth chapter, “Underneath,” sees the young lovers at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, at least in London. I mean I suppose it could be worse: they could be immigrants, for one thing. Truth be told, my eyes glazed over for much of this chapter, if only because much of it is like a Socratic dialogue, and sad to say Wells’s dialogue is not very memorable here. The humor and wry observations on the future often come through in the narration, which is quite a different thing. More memorable is the final chapter, “Bindon Intervenes,” which introduces us to the failed suitor in earnest, after only really hearing about him up to this point. Despite only coming around near the story’s climax, Bindon stands as the most developed character here, which strikes me as backwards. It’s clear that Wells intended Bindon to serve as Denton’s dark reflection, a man who is similarly romantic in a world that has left romance to the wayside, but who lacks Denton’s working-class charm; in effect he is like Denton if he was a proto-incel. Despite ostensibly being the antagonist, having conspired with Elizabeth’s dad, there’s something pitiable about Bindon that makes him a somewhat tragic figure. Not helping matters is he finds out he terminally ill, with not long to live. It would’ve been nice had Wells given us insight into Bindon’s character much earlier in the story beyond hearsay. As it stands this gear-switching in the final chapter comes about too little, too late, and like other parts of the story it feels undercooked.
Oh, and the ending sucks. I understand that it’s supposed to be ironic, but it’s bad storytelling to have your heroes get what they want through no real action or effort of their own. Bindon dies and Elizabeth inherits his fortune, on account of the cucked man having a change of heart as he’s come to realize he would die soon anyway. The conflict basically takes care of itself and Our Heroes™ get their happily-ever-after. This is unspeakably lame; I almost always hate it when writers pull this shit, and in 1899 Wells would’ve known better than to end on such a note.
A Step Farther Out
Sad to say this is not a hidden masterpiece or a semi-forgotten classic in Wells’s body of work, although it does have its points. A Story of the Days to Come feels like a microcosm of Wells’s chief concerns as both a satirist and a genuine speculator on the future, but it’s too long to have the punch of his best short stories and too short to be given the same depth of ideas as his best novels, or even the similarly-lengthed The Time Machine. Wells was one of the few true pioneers of science fiction, in the sense that he wrote about things that had never actually been put to paper before and broadened people’s horizons more than most of his descendants; but being on the cutting edge also meant that sometimes he, well, got cut. It’s the price one must pay for innovation.
(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, April 1928.)
Who Goes There?
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 and died in 1946, just short of his 80th birthday but just long enough to have seen the end of World War II. Wells is one of the most important writers of SF to have ever lived—maybe the most important. To be an SF fan and not read at least a bit of H. G. Wells would be like being a horror fan and not having read any H. P. Lovecraft, or being an English major and not engaging with Shakespeare or the King James translation of the Bible at all: it’s basically unthinkable. Wells’s influence is made more remarkable when you consider that SF was by no means the only genre he wrote in, although his non-SF work has been thrown into the dustbin of history, and also that he wrote pretty much all of his most important work in the field in the span of about a decade, between 1895 and 1905. While he was still writing, albeit very little SF at this point, in the 1920s, Wells’s presence in the earliest genre magazines, namely Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, was entirely through reprints. Indeed he seemed to appear in nearly every issue of Amazing Stories while Hugo Gernsback had control of that magazine. A Story of the Days to Come was first published in 1899 as five related stories, which then became its chapters. This is a novella, about as long as The Time Machine, but it’s nowhere near as well-known as Wells’s most famous novels or even short stories, I suspect because while it’s certainly ambitious, it lacks the iconic characters, ideas, and even plot momentum of those other works. This is a story that will be rather hard to talk about in terms of plot beats, so that, combined with depression (it took me nearly an hour to get out of bed this morning), made writing about this story a bit of a challenge.
Placing Coordinates
First published as five stories in 1899, in Pall Mall Magazine. It was then serialized in the April and May 1928 issues of Amazing Stories. It’s also been reprinted in The Science Fiction Century (ed. David G. Hartwell) and the Wells collections Tales of Space and Time and The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells. Tales of Space and Time has been in the public domain since forever, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.
Enhancing Image
We start with less of a character and more of an archetype, in the form of Mr. Morris, of the late Victorian era, and his distant descendant, Mwres, who are both perfectly conservative and upstanding men of their times and shared place—that being London of the 19th and 22nd centuries, respectively. Morris/Mwres is totally unconscious about class, cares nothing for the poor, attends church regularly but without passion, and can hardly be bothered to read anything. Indeed Mwres uses a “phonograph,” which here functions like a laptop or audiobook, to consume information, rather than reading the newspapers like his ancestor. Nobody reads anymore. Mwres meets with a hypnotist so that he might do something about his daughter Elizabeth, who is 18 at the story’s beginning and thus of marrying age. Mwres wants Elizabeth married off to a colleague of his, Bindon, a much older man, “plain little man, you know, and a bit unpleasant in some of his ways, but an excellent fellow really.” But Elizabeth, being a romantic and having indulged in many “romances” (tales of adventure), has set her sights on Denton, “a mere attendant upon the stage on which the flying-machines from Paris alight,” who like Elizabeth is a romantic in a future society which has all but abandoned things like poetry and romance of the lovey-dovey sort. Also, both Elizabeth and Denton can read and write, which bothers Mwres. The hypnotist thus messes with Elizabeth mind such that she forgets all about the young man she’s so smitten with, and it’s up to Denton to figure out why his girlfriend doesn’t recognize him the next time the two of them cross paths and how to undo the hypnotism.
As you can see, this is rather satirical. Morris/Mwres is a obviously dig at the conformist, or the “moderate conservative,” someone who might vote Labour but only so long as the party doesn’t get too woke. Wells was a socialist; more specifically he was a Fabian, or what we’d now call a democratic socialist. He was also a technophile, although his feelings on the possibility of technological progress bettering mankind soured as he grew older. Even in A Story of the Days to Come there’s an ambivalence about technology’s place in human progress, although as we’ll see, the “primitivist” option is also shown to be inadequate. If anything tech is shown to be more or less neutral here, more a tool that worsens an already-existing problem—that being the problem of capitalism and class division. This whole fucking plot gets going because the upper-class Mwres, who despite being rich is shown to be an ignoramus, sees the middle-to-lower-class Denton as unfitting for his daughter; and of course Elizabeth has no real say in the matter. Hypnotism, or mesmerism as it was also called at the time, was treated as a big deal in the 19th century, such that in Wells’s story it has become such an advanced practice as to render psychology obsolete. Mind you that psychology as one of the soft sciences was only in its infant stage when Wells wrote A Story of the Days to Come, such that Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams hadn’t even been published yet. The automobile had also not yet become commercially viable enough at the time to be a common presence, and you can sort of feel its absence in this story. Conversely, “flying-machines” have become a preferred mode of commercial travel in-story, despite the first working airplane still being a few years off in the real world. Granted, people had speculated on flying-machines for literally centuries at this point, and Wells would even see the beginnings of commercial flying in his lifetime. My point is that while this story takes place circa 2100, it still reads as if written from the perspective of someone living in 1900—which may very well be the point. The narration, while ostensibly third-person, is very much targeted at a Victorian readership.
This is all intriguing, after the fact, but one issue I had while actually reading A Story of the Days to Come is that from a plotting standpoint this is far from Wells’s best work. A rule of thumb with writing short fiction is that you wanna stick to one perspective: it could be a first-person narrator, or a bird’s-eye-view third-person narrator, but the idea is we should stuck in the head of only one character. You can get away with changing perspectives in a novel, but for short fiction it’s a dangerous game. Wells violates this rule by switching us between at least three perspectives in these first three chapters (the first installment), between the omniscient third-person narrator, Mwres, and Denton. It makes scene and chapter breaks surprisingly confusing, made worse because Mwres and Denton meet the same hypnotist at different points. By the way, it is massively convenient that Denton, after having been dismayed by Elizabeth apparently forgetting all about him, goes to the same hypnotist that Mwres had consulted to brainwash Elizabeth in the first place. Of course Denton uses a little man-handling to get what he wants and make the hyptotist undo the conditioning on Elizabeth, so that the two can be together again—the new problem now being that there’s no going back. They’ve gone against Mwres’s wishes and will not have to live almost like fugitives, since Elizabeth only has as much as what her old man lets her and Denton doesn’t have many prospects of his own. They live at Denton’s place, for a bit, but having become disillusioned with city life, and also being very low on cash, they decide to hit the road and head out to a place very few people live in now: the countryside. It’s a shame Wells didn’t live long enough to have read Clifford Simak’s City, he probably would’ve been very keen on it. Then again, I’m not sure how much SF Wells actually had read, since he seemed irked by the newfangled label.
There Be Spoilers Here
The England of the future is somewhat dystopian, and one way Wells implies this is the fact that “countryside” has mostly been reclaimed by the natural world. Where once there were whole societies of peasantry in the English countryside, now there’s only the stray farmer or shepherd. As with Clifford Simak’s fiction, humanity is shown as being in decline by virtue of having cut itself off from the natural world; man seems to be degrade further the more “unnatural” he becomes. A shepherd meets Denton and Elizabeth as they start their new lives as would-be farmers, and tells them (correctly) that they won’t last long in the countryside; they simply weren’t raised to adapt to this kind of lifestyle. But they do give the whole thing the good old college try, as it were, and honestly the attempt could’ve turned out worse. They both could’ve died easily, between the elements and wild animals; but what finally pushes them to move back to the city is the issue of trespassing, and damn near getting killed by a pack of dogs. (Wells, given his politics, wasn’t keen on private property.) It’s at this point that the first installment ends, with Our Heroes™ having lost the battle, but maybe not the war. We’ll have to wait and see about that. I do wish I cared more about Denton and Elizabeth as people, although obviously I do wanna see them overcome a system that has been built up over generations to keep them apart. With Wells, his characters tend to serve his ideas, rather than the other way around, which is how SF has mostly been written for the past century.
A Step Farther Out
I’m a bit ambivalent about A Story of the Days to Come so far, although David G. Hartwell thought it enough of a hidden gem that he says so in his introduction for it in The Science Fiction Century. The problem is that it works better as almost a fictionalized essay rather than a “story.” Wells at his best is still no Shakespeare when it comes to style or developing characters, but he can be really good at plotting and hitting the reader with ideas that, at least in the last days of the Victorian era, they might not have ever considered before. Wells wrote with the primary purpose of opening people’s minds to a whole new realm of possibilities, which he believed in as both an SF writer and a socialist. That the politics of genre SF (we’re talking about the views of authors and editors) during its early years, from the 1920s to about 1950, would be a lot more reactionary than Wells, is beside the point. You could argue A Story of the Days to Come is SF in its purest form, that being it’s devoted to speculating on the future, and cannot be confused for any other genre. For better or worse.
(Cover by Lloyd Birmingham. Amazing Stories, October 1963.)
Who Goes There?
Cordwainer Smith had such a colorful life that you could probably make a movie out of it. Where to even start? Real name Paul Linebarger, Smith was born to American missionaries who often traveled around the globe, such that Smith went from school to school and didn’t have much time to make any friends in his youth. Of all the places he visited China seemed to leave by far the biggest impression, with his father even being involved in Chinese politics in the early 20th century. Smith was Sun Yat-sen’s godson, although Sun Yat-sen died when Smith would’ve been only twelve. The Christianity of both his parents and godfather would also have an influence on Smith’s work, although he was by no means didactic about it. He came up with the name “Cordwainer Smith” to create a thick degree of separation between his life working in government and his SF writing. While he’s now most known for his SF, Smith (as Linebarger) wrote the first major text on psychological warfare, literally titled Psychological Warfare, as well as non-fiction works on East-Asian geopolitics. Under the pseudonym “Felix C. Forrest” (a reference to his Chinese name) he also wrote espionage novels, although good luck finding those nowadays.
Smith was one of the most idiosyncratic writers of his era, inside or outside of SF, and one has to wonder what more he could’ve done during the height of the New Wave (he died in 1966). His first SF story as an adult, “Scanners Live in Vain,” was published in 1950, but Smith wouldn’t get consistently published until the last half-dozen or so years of his life, in no small part thanks to Frederik Pohl. From circa 1961 onward Pohl had first dibs on Smith’s fiction, such that “Drunkboat” is one of the few Smith stories from this era to not be published in any of Pohl’s magazines—which means he must’ve rejected it. I can see why: it’s kind of a hot mess. But it’s the kind of noble failure that showcases a unique talent, and the individual components are very much worth your interest.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October 1963 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted quite a few times, in The 9th Annual of the Year’s Best SF (ed. Judith Merril), Amazing Stories: 60 Years of the Best Science Fiction (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and the heckin’ chonker The Science Fiction Century (ed. David G. Hartwell). Of course it’s also in The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith. Now, it’s come to my attention that most of Smith’s work has fallen out of copyright—in Canada. This story is on the Canadian version of Project Gutenberg. I’m not advising you do this, but if you (as a non-Canadian) were to use a VPN and disguise yourself as one of the filthy, unwashed denizens of Toronto…
Enhancing Image
This is a hard story to spoil, if only because Smith spoils it for us, right at the beginning. We’re told that Artyr Rambo (yes, that is his name) was a man looking for his beloved, Elizabeth, apparently separately by many light-years, and he would do anything to get to her, including hopping aboard a rocket ship “of an ancient design” with the letters IOM (Instrumentality of Mankind) on its side and jaunting his way over to the hospital where she’s being kept. We know from the start that Rambo succeeds, that he and Elizabeth are reunited, and that Rambo himself has since gone down as a legend. The story, as such, is written like an oral telling of something ancient, mythical, and probably fabricated, but which serves an inspirational purpose. We know how this story starts and ends, but without context and without what will turn out to be a frenzied middle that will take a fair bit of explaining. Rambo winds up naked and unconscious, but apparently alive, just outside the Old Main Hospital where Elizabeth is being kept—or rather her body is. (Death does not have the same ramifications at this point in the Instrumentality history as it does for us.) How he got there, without his rocket ship anywhere in sight, is the mystery that will drive the plot. But of course I’ve already mentioned “jaunting”…
“Drunkboat” starts basically as a hospital drama, with the doctors trying to get the comatose Rambo to response—then later realizing that trying to get a response from him may leave everyone worse off. One of the doctors, Grosbeck, even suggests killing Rambo once it becomes clear that there’s something monstrously wrong with the patient, but Vomact, the chief doctor, vetoes the decision. This will have disastrous consequences short-term, but his survival will turn Rambo into a legend and so revolutionize space flight. (Smith also adds in parenthetical asides, like this one, telling us about things that haven’t happens in-story yet, or things Rambo would not have known about at the time.) So there’s a problem. Rambo is comatose and yet seems to have powers beyond human understanding; he’s able to do things by some external force, which will eventually spark the story’s climax. (But aren’t I getting ahead of myself again?) A lot of damage could’ve been prevented had Rambo stayed conscious and been able to tell the doctors what he wanted. “Not till much later did people understand what Rambo had been trying to do—crossing sixty mere meters to reach his Elizabeth when he had already jumped an un-count of light-years to return to her.” Rambo, unbeknownst to everyone at the hospital, was a guinea pig for Crudelta, one of the Lords of the Instrumentality, and he was a test subject for discovering “space-three”—a test that proved to be, if anything, too successful. Space-three (it’s written a few different ways, but I’m calling it that for consistency’s sake) is a word that comes up in several Instrumentality stories, but here we actually get something like an explanation.
You may think this is all a bit confusing. It is. Smith crams a lot of his future history into this novelette, such that it feels longer than it is, if only by virtue of feeling overstuffed. We’re told, mostly in a casual way, that this is a distant future where humanity has spread across many planets, being ruled by the Instrumentality which is a technocratic aristocracy (or an aristocratic technocracy), complete with computers and robots. The underpeople, a coalition of half-human half-animal genetically engineered humanoids made for slave labor, are only mentioned in passing in “Drunkboat,” and if you were to read just this story you wouldn’t know that the underpeople are arguably the most important factor in Smith’s future history. You wouldn’t even know what the underpeople are just from reading “Drunkboat.” On the one hand this makes Smith’s writing hard to make sense of at times, and is a problem not unique to this story but rather something that makes the barrier of entry for Smith’s writing a rather high one; but then I love how there are details on the margins of the story that hint as a much larger universe—so large that a couple dozen short stories and novellas, plus a novel, Smith couldn’t “finish” the future history. He gives the impression of something impossibly distant in our future, yet something so old in his future that Rambo’s story is told like one of Homer’s epics. It doesn’t work totally here, but you have to admire the ambition.
Reading “Drunkboat,” the only example in SF it reminded me of that would’ve predated the story is one of the most influential and experimental of all ’50s SF novels: Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Granted that Rambo is not a snarling brute like Bester’s Gully Foyle, but still he causes a lot of damage (including a dozen people killed “irrevocably,” their bodies being vaporized and so irretrievable) in the name of a rather self-centered goal: getting back with Elizabeth. There’s also the question of jaunting, Bester’s word for teleporting across space in his novel that I’ll use here; Smith has a different word for it, but it’s basically the same thing. I’m not sure if Smith had read Bester’s novel, but he likely did, and who can blame him? Bester’s novel and the Instrumentality future history do share a fair bit in common: they see humanity using spaceships (and later teleporting) to conquer the stars, and yet the aristocracy is maybe more powerful than ever before. Corruption is everywhere. Human life is treated callously. In Smith’s world slavery has come back in a big way. Both robots and the underpeople are treated as expendable. There’s a pessimism (but also a Christian-coded hope of liberation) in Smith’s world that might’ve been off-putting in the ’50s (hence him struggling to find outlets then), but which anticipated the New Wave. I’m a lot more interested in the world of the story than the story itself. Maybe the story is not really the point.
There Be Spoilers Here
If “Drunkboat” had a fatal flaw, other than being cluttered, it’s that it switches gears abruptly a couple times, such that I’m not sure what I would classify it as other than SF generally. I said before it starts as a hospital drama, but then suddenly (and I think unconvincingly) it turns into proto-military SF before finally turning into sort of a courtroom drama. I would have less of a problem with this trajectory if the story was longer, possibly novella-length, but as is it’s a jumble wherein the components are easy to lose track of. It doesn’t help either that Rambo, the protagonist, is unconscious for most of the story. Granted, Frankenstein’s monster didn’t talk much either. Crudelta is a curious villain (if you can call him that), but he only really gets a chance to shine in the last stretch. Elizabeth barely even qualifies as a character, and when she gets a case of killed-and-then-revived amnesia (in-story a person getting killed and then brought back may as well be a different person since they get amnesia and are likely to form a different personality) it’s more like something inconvenient that Rambo has to get used to rather than tragic. (After reading a fair bit of Smith I do have to wonder if he was only capable of writing women as either shrewish, aloof, or submissive.) It’s implied that Crudelta will not face punishment for his inhuman treatment of Rambo, but that’s not really a criticism. After all, Rambo doesn’t have too much to complain about, for he has come back a demigod who can start a literal war with just his manipulation of space-three.
A Step Farther Out
The problem I encountered with “Drunkboat” was I found it a lot more fun to think about than to read. This is less a functioning self-contained story and more a neat bit of world-building that happens to have a really tangled plot at its center. If this is your first Instrumentality story then there are small details here that Smith doesn’t elaborate on and which will probably not make any sense to you. Even after having read a decent portion of Smith’s fiction (there isn’t a whole lot of it), my brain still ached a bit by the end. And yet I have to recommend “Drunkboat” as a curiosity. For both better and worse, nobody in the pre-New Wave days wrote like Cordwainer Smith, such that even his failures are worth it.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 