(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1947.)
I was thinking of taking a break from this blog for this month, but maybe I’ll save the vacation for September. Funnily enough it was easier to come up with a review forecast, with stuff I’m interested in checking out, than it was to announce a month-long break. This is what happens when you’re a compulsive reader.
Anyway, we’re back to our usually programming, although we have a serial novel in a whopping four installments (although Space Viking is not as long as the installment number would have you think), as well as a reprinted SF-horror yarn by one of the most famous British authors of all time. Of course, with the exception of Arthur Conan Doyle, these are all authors I’ve covered before. I figured that if I’m gonna keep myself busy, even going against my own expectations, I may as well keep things “safe” for the time being. At least with Bruce Sterling this is earned, considering I was set to write about another short story of his many moons ago, only to not get around to it. Consider this a second attempt.
I’m keeping this post short and sweet. Not much to report on my end, aside from recently acquiring a second cat. (Cats are easy to adopt, like they just kinda let you pick them up, get them their shots, sign a paper, badda-bing badda-boom.) I also have maybe one too many books on my plate at the moment (incidentally none of them are genre fiction), so I hope to whittle that down, make things more manageable.
As for the stories, we have one from the 1910s, one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, and two from the 1980s.
For the serial:
Space Viking by H. Beam Piper. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, November 1962 to February 1963. Piper was born in 1904, but didn’t start writing SF until he was in his forties, making his debut in 1947. The next decade or so was productive enough for him, including the non-SF mystery novel Murder in the Gun Room. Said novel, while not SF, does pay tribute to fandom in the years following World War II. Space Viking was one of several novels Piper had written in quick succession in the last few years of his life, along with The Cosmic Computer, Little Fuzzy (and its sequel), and Lord Kalvin of Otherwhen. Sadly, after a failed marriage and with the belief that his writing career was floundering, Piper took his own life in 1964.
For the novellas:
“The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” by James Tiptree, Jr. From the May 1988 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Tiptree is one of the most acclaimed authors of her generation, although despite being typically considered part of the New Wave she was actually a decade or two older than most of her peers. Her life story is a dramatic one, worthy of a Hollywood biopic, and the circumstances of her death remain controversial to this day.
“The Araqnid Window” by Charles L. Harness. From the December 1974 issue of Amazing Stories. Harness’s career as a writer spanned six decades, although it came in fits and starts. He stepped away from writing in the ’50s to focus on his job and raising his family, only returning after a decade. “The Araqnid Window” itself is one of only two Harness stories published in the ’70s. His job as a patent attorney goes to explain his low output.
For the short stories:
“Sunken Gardens” by Bruce Sterling. From the June 1984 issue of Omni. Sterling was born in Brownsville, Texas, but later became an Austin denizen. Unusually he made his fiction debut with a novel, Involution Ocean, published when he was very young. His first ambitious project, though, was the Shaper/Mechanist universe, comprising the novel Schismatrix and some short stories.
“The Horror of the Heights” by Arthur Conan Doyle. From the December 1947 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. First published in 1913. While Doyle did not invent the detective story (he rightly credits Edgar Allan Poe with that), he did codify the genre and became quite rich and famous off of it it. Doyle also wrote in other genres, though, including horror and science fiction.
A short and sweet review forecast for this month, partly because I’m running behind on my writing a bit and so am pressed for time, but also because I don’t have a particular theme in mind here. Of course, if you thought I was gonna take a break from reviewing spooky fiction altogether after last month, you’d be mistaken, as both of the short stories due for November are horror pieces. We’re still deep in autumn, after all, and honestly my thirst for spooky shit has not been quenched.
Another thing I just randomly decided to throw in there is that both of the serials are novels written in collaboration, by authors who gained a good deal of acclaim and presumably money from working together. In one case there’s decades-long besties Larry Niven and the late Jerry Pournelle, who shared similar politics and also writing philosophies. There’s also the husband-wife duo of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, perennial favorites on this site, who wrote most of their novels together, although for decades Fury has been erroneously credited to just Kuttner.
We’ve got one story from the 1850s (the oldest I will have reviewed thus far), two from the 1940s, two from the 1970s, and one from the 2000s.
For the serials:
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, August to October 1975. Niven had quickly established himself as one of the major hard SF writers by the end of the ’60s, but Pournelle had a longer road to success, first being active as a fan and then not writing his first stories and articles professionally till he was deep in his thirties. In the ’70s and ’80s Niven and Pournelle wrote several successful novels in collaboration.
Fury by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1947. Kuttner and Moore wrote so much, both together and each solo, that they resorted to a few pseudonyms, one of them being Lawrence O’Donnell. Fury takes place in the same universe as the earlier Kuttner-Moore story “Clash by Night.” Despite Fury historically being credited to Kuttner alone, Moore claimed years later to having been a minor collaborator.
For the novellas:
“Against the Fall of Night” by Arthur C. Clarke. From the November 1948 issue of Startling Stories. Clarke is one of the most famous SF writers ever, to the point that by the ’60s he had become, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, a media personality. He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey whilst writing the novel version parallel to it.
“The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison. From the March 1970 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Ellison is similarly a pretty famous (if more controversial) figure, being just as notorious for his real-life antics and combative nature as for his writing. This novella, one of Ellison’s longest stories, works as a standalone but was commissioned as part of a series which features the same main character.
For the short stories:
“The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell. From the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. First published in 1852. Now here’s a name you probably didn’t see coming. For someone who gained notoriety as one of the finest novelists of the mid-Victorian period, as well as being Charlotte Brontë’s first major biographer, Gaskell also wrote a fair amount of supernatural fiction.
“I Live with You” by Carol Emshwiller. From the March 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By this point Carol had outlived her late husband, Ed Emshwiller, by over a decade, but she had long since made a name for herself. The last Emshwiller story I wrote about was from the late ’50s, but nearly half a century later we still find her seemingly in her prime.
(Childhood’s End. Cover by Richard Powers. Ballantine Books, 1953.)
Are we halfway through the first month of the year already? Aw geez, that means I gotta write something. I always have a few editorial ideas swimming around, but the question is always: When should I write these? A topic can be timeless, or it could benefit from being discussed at just the right moment. The right person in the right place can make all the difference, and the same goes for articles, even ones I’m not getting paid for. It’s January 15, 2023, which means two things: it’s a Sunday, and it’s also Robert Silverberg’s 88th birthday. Hopefully we can get a dozen more out of him.
I don’t consider myself a big Silverberg fan, at least not yet, but I do see his place as a constant in SF history as indispensable. I can’t think of anyone alive now aside from maybe Samuel R. Delany whom I would like to sit down with and interview for an hour more than Silverberg, for the simple reason that Silverberg has a nigh-endless supply of stories to tell—not stories as in fiction, mind you, but life stories, stories within SF fandom, stories about all the times he got rejected by editors and, naturally, the subsequent acceptances. This is a man who traded words with John W. Campbell, Anthony Boucher, H. L. Gold, Frederik Pohl, Ben Bova, etc., and lived to tell the tale. This man has attended every Hugo ceremony since its inception in 1953, since he was just old enough to be able to attend the Hugos, and that alone would make his memory a precious thing to back up on some hypothetical external hard drive for people’s memories, which are essentially their beings anyway.
And speaking of 1953…
I have a lot of anthologies on my shelves. I’m young and amateur, but still I think I have a good number. One of those is Silverberg’s Science Fiction: 101, which is a curious mixture of fiction anthology, writing advice, and memoir. I don’t think it’s in print anymore, sadly, but I do recommend finding a copy, as, regardless of how one may feel about Silverberg as a person, the fiction selected is of quite a high standard—some certified classics with a few deeper cuts thrown into the equation. Something I couldn’t help but notice, though, even if Silverberg didn’t bring it up himself, is that focus on ’50s SF in the anthology, and more specifically on a certain year. Of the thirteen stories included, five are from 1953, which one might think to be a little much, especially given that there are only two stories from the ’40s (C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” and Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain”). Yet 1953 is undoubtedly framed as a Big Year™ for Silverberg, which makes sense; he was just then starting to write SF in earnest, having lurked around long enough as a fan and now readying to make his mark on the field.
Science Fiction: 101 shows off short SF that meant a lot to Silverberg personally, mostly stuff published during a period in his life when he was making the jump from fan to professional. The slant towards 1953, however, only hints at just how prolific and remarkably high in quality that year was for a lot of people active in the field then. On multiple fronts, the field was rolling ahead at full speed, with the growing accessibility of paperbacks meeting halfway with a magazine market which was at the very height of a bubble—a bubble that, mind you, was about to burst, but in the moment it was at a point of critical mass, which meant a diverse market for writers who otherwise might struggle to get published in Astounding or Galaxy. In the US along there were well over a dozen SF magazines active in ’53, including Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Future Science Fiction, Science Fiction Quarterly, Worlds of If, Universe Science Fiction, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Space Science Fiction, and frankly almost too many more to count. We would not see this saturated an SF magazine market again until, well, now, but I’ll come back to that at the end.
There was something for everyone. If you wanted “literary” thinking man’s SF then Galaxy and F&SF scratched that itch tremendously; if you’re stubborn and like to read macho SF about psi powers then Astounding has your back; if you’re into planetary romance and generally adventure SF then there are a few options; if you like certain authors but wish you could buy even more of what they’re selling, then good news, those authors have probably sold to more magazines than you existed. And of course, if you’re one of those few sad fantasy readers in that weird point in time that’s post-Chronicles of Narnia but pre-Lord of the Rings then you’ll be pleased to know there’s a new fantasy magazine on the market: Beyond Fantasy Fiction, helmed by Galaxy‘s own H. L. Gold. And if that’s not enough, especially if you’re an avid book reader, the paperback market for SF is opening up big time, and that door will only open wider.
1953 was a great year to be Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and quite a few others. Dick and Sheckley had debuted the previous year, but 1953 saw these one-man writing factories pull out all the stops; you could probably make a top 10 list of your favorite Robert Sheckley stories from 1953 alone. It was also the year that Arthur C. Clarke, who had appeared from time to time in the American market previously, made his first big splash with American readers here, not just with the publication of Childhood’s End but also a slew of short stories that are still highly regarded, the most famous being “The Nine Billion Names of God.” Poul Anderson, who had been active for some years but had not made much impact, invoked F&SF‘s first serial with Three Hearts and Three Lions, forcing editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas to backpedal on their “no serials” policy.
When it came time for Hugo voters back in 2004 to partake in the Retro Hugos, all the aforementioned authors got at least one nomination, not to mention others getting in as well. I understand that the Retro Hugos are a controversial topic (Worldcon doesn’t even do them anymore, at least for now), but I find the idea admirable, and at the very least we get some deep cuts that deserve to be rediscovered on top of the usual suspects. The “1954” Retro Hugos, covering the best stuff to come out of 1953, might have, across all its fiction categories, the strongest of any Retro Hugo lineup. You’re probably thinking, “Voters are biased, they always pick either already-famous works or minor works by famous authors,” and that is basically true. For one I’m pretty sure the people who gave Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” the Retro Hugo for Best Short Story were thinking about the justly famous Twilight Zone adaptation and had not actually read Knight’s story; if they did they would deem it as minor. I’m also pretty sure Ray Bradbury was not the best fan writer of 1938, just call it a hunch.
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, October 1953.)
What makes the 1954 Retro Hugos different, however, is that the shortlists (never mind the winners) for fiction, regardless of category, are all but unimpeachable. Let’s take Best Novel as an example, because this really is a golden set of nominees. We have Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, and the winner with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. While not my personal favorite, Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most famous novels in all of SF; people continue to read it, it’s still being discussed quite actively, and it’s even taught in schools; it’s a stone-cold classic of the field and its win is deserved. With that said, you could literally pick any of these other novels and you wouldn’t really be wrong to do so. The Caves of Steel is arguably Asimov’s single best novel; Childhood’s End is a career highlight for Clarke, not to mention one of his most influential; More Than Human sees Sturgeon in rare good form as a novelist; and even the most obscure of the bunch, Mission of Gravity (Clement is one of those authors begging to be rediscovered), is a foundational example of hard SF.
All killer, no filler. You can’t say that with the Best Novel shortlist for any other Retro Hugo year, either because of nominees that are justly forgotten or because of nominees that don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. Yet the near-uniform excellence of the nominees here, as the best of 1953, tells me that it was a very good year indeed. A lot of people were active in the field at the time, but just as importantly, a lot of those people were producing damn good work that still holds up. There was filler, and there was retrograde SF that would’ve been considered old-timey in fashion even in 1953, but there was also so much treasure from so many different voices that the sheer level of quantity and quality is hard to ignore. It was even a good time to be a lady author, what with women like C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Margaret St. Clair, Andre Norton, Judith Merril, and others who have been sadly forgotten producing good work; we would not see this many women contributing to SF again until at least the ’70s.
Now, I admit, I have a ’50s bias. When I started reading short SF in earnest some years ago I mostly stuck to the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, with that middle decade especially getting attention. I have a real soft spot for SF from the ’50s, but not because it’s idyllic or puritanical or old-fashioned—it’s because the SF of that period is often not any of those things. The first serial I reviewed for my site was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, a sleazy novel about cold-blooded murder, prostitution, incest, and generally the dark side of a world where telepaths are the top 1%. A little more intense than what you’d expect for a novel published in 1952, and yet when the inaugural Hugos were held the following year Bester’s novel was honored with the first Hugo for Best Novel. Clearly writers and readers alike (at least enough of them) were daring enough in 1953 to think that a novel about the aforementioned cold-blooded murder, prostitution, incest, etc., was not only welcomed in SF spaces but could be considered a great work of literature. People seventy years ago were not as naïve as we like to pretend.
But that was, after all, seventy years ago, and of course 1953 is not the best year in SF history; there really cannot be a “best year” for a genre lauded for its capacity to change and adapt over time. The best year for SF hopefully has not happened yet. Yet certainly 1953 is emblematic of a specific point in time for the genre’s history, a time when the magazine market was booming, book publishing was on the rise, and we even get a few major “sci-fi” films that would help determine the genre’s cinematic power for the coming decade; more specifically I’m thinking of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The War of the Worlds, by no means perfect movies but ones which set a standard for the genre on the silver screen. The variety of voices writing SF in 1953 would also not be outdone for many years, and if we’re talking about short SF alone, we would not see such diversity again until the current era, what with several online magazines publishing works by people who would not have been heard even in that wonderland of ’53, whether because of their race, sexual orientation, or political leanings.
The future should always look better, and if it doesn’t then we should try to make sure that it does. There’ve been think pieces and discussions recently about the need for utopian SF, and why not? SF writers aren’t supposed to predict the future, but it’s possible to offer a blueprint for how people might be able to make a world wherein future generations will want to live. First, however, you need SF that’s thriving with quality works by quality people, and you can’t have that if the market has narrowed, where only so many outlets can only take so many voices. I shudder to think of a time when short SF has been basically locked out of discussion by virtue of so few short stories being published, which is why it’s such a good thing that the market is doing very well right now, and why such a level of diversity that we now see is to be treasured. If 1953 for SF represents anything it’s the same thing that 2023 for SF ought to represent: the promise of a good future.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 