Tag: august derleth

The Observatory: This Is Not a Review

November 6th, 2024

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, September 1941.)

I was supposed to write my review of “Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth for today, but I could not find it in myself to do so. For one I have to admit I’ve been feeling horribly drained from the business of moving into my apartment, which I still haven’t totally finished with yet. I’ve barely slept for the past few weeks, hence the lack of a mid-month editorial post in October. Anyway, this isn’t a review. If you want my opinion on the story, it’s middling. Derleth was a pretty good editor but a second-rate writer, from the weird fiction of his that I’ve read, and “Beyond the Threshold” explicitly tips its hat to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos (a name Lovecraft himself did not use) without doing anything meaningfully extra. It has a bit of that rural Wisconsin atmosphere, but mostly does away with it in favor of a typical old-dark-house-has-dark-secrets narrative. If you want a take that’s a bit more in-depth you’ll have to wait a couple weeks, as I am really doing a proper (albeit short) review of this story for Galactic Journey, as part of the chunky anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I’ll be reviewing more than half the stories in that book, so keep an eye out for that. Hopefully I will have also regained my writing energy by then.

Unfortunately I’m not here to talk about fiction, really. In the morning, today, November 6th, Americans woke up to find that the improbable (not the impossible, because I think we all understood the chance of this happening was very real) had happened. Now, I don’t make my politics a secret on here; after all it’s my blog and nobody else’s. Over the past couple years my views have shifted farther left: back in August 2022, when I posted my first review here, I think I considered myself a fellow traveler, but now I would say I’m a libertarian socialist. I used to be a libertarian of the American sort (we all make mistakes, huh), but now I’m a libertarian in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde. I’m ambivalent about the state’s capacity to help marginalized groups and I’m even more ambivalent about marginalized people’s rights being secured through electoral means. Yesterday we had the chance to prove that we are above electing the king of the yuppies (that he’s also very likely a rapist is pretty significant, but which mainstream news media has treated as almost incidental) back into office, but we failed. The Democratic establishment failed its voter base and its voter base in turn failed the most vulnerable people in this country. Indeed it’s a collective failure of liberalism in the US that we have not seen since—well, the 2016 election. We’ve been told (accurately) that Trumpism is an American blue-collar sort of fascism, yet if this is true then liberalism has failed to stop fascism—again.

To be clear, and I shouldn’t have to say this given what I had just said but I’ll do it anyway, I don’t like Kamala Harris, as both a politician and person. I think she’s a weasel, a centrist with a few progressive sympathies but ultimately someone who tried really hard to cater to “moderate” conservatives, a plan which literally did not work. It was a huge gamble, because calling Dick Cheney brat (how do I even explain to people of the future what “being brat” means) alienated a lot of left-liberal people, understandably. Who the actual fuck voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but then Harris in 2024? Who of that demographic was persuaded? Cuddling up with neo-conservatives while also ignoring (at best it was ignoring) the concerns of Palestinian-Americans and Arab-Americans at large was not a good move! I know, this may seem like a controversial opinion, but as someone who basically was radicalized by Israel’s siege of Gaza, I think the Biden (later Harris) campaign leaving Arab-Americans in the dust was very bad. Islamophobia has been a major problem in this country since at least 9/11, and it has not really gotten better. Sure, we have a few Muslim members of congress, but look at how the Biden administration has defended them against harassment, or rather how the Biden administration has not: it’s disgraceful. I say this as someone who, back when I was a right-libertarian and edgy atheist (I’m much softer on religion nowadays), also had Islamophobic tendencies; so I know very well what it looks like. Large swaths of the population see Muslims as subhuman, and unfortunately those people will be totally without shame about it.

We have failed queer people (so that includes me), we have failed people with disabilities (also includes me), we have failed the working class, we have failed black Americans, we have failed Muslim Americans, we have failed the women of this country, and of course we have failed ourselves. What do we do with this information? How does it relate to this blog, which is after all a genre fiction review fan site? Because I’m not here to write political tracts, I’m generally someone who reads for the pleasure of it. As a leftist I still enjoy right-leaning writers like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and so on. I don’t believe in abstaining from reading fiction by authors with very different political views, or at least I try to hold myself to that belief; obviously there’s a limit for everything. But, I’m queer, and my partners are all queer, and so are quite a few of my friends. I had to talk one of my partners through a panic attack over the phone last night. We live in a country that basically wants us dead, because most of the American population is homophobic and/or transphobic. This has been the case since forever, but it’s impossible to ignore now, with social media and the little slivers of mainstream visibility queer people get. It’s not even about resisting the incoming Trump administration, it’s simply about coping, and finding ways to support marginalized people, even if these are small things like donating to someone’s GoFundMe. God knows I’ve been supporting some of the fellow queer people in my life for a minute now. I’ve said before that I use this blog as a coping mechanism, because I have a history of depression and anxiety, and that hasn’t changed.

Here’s the thing, and this happened after Trump won in 2016 as well: the people who voted him in, who are really fucking stoked about him winning, are not gonna be any happier in the long run. If anything, with the exception of the rich (because the rich will evade basically any kind of retribution, even climate disaster [for now]), these Trumpists are gonna be made more miserable, if for no other reason than that Trump is such a toxic personality that mere exposure to him and his fucking yapping for long enough will do something horrid to one’s psyche, even if that person is pro-Trump. I’ve seen it happen first-hand, it’s a very creepy phenomenon, but Trumpists also don’t wanna admit that their own guy, whom they treat like a demi-god, makes them feel miserable. And we’re not even getting into his “economic plan” to combat inflation, because assuming that actually happens we’re all gonna be feeling that a year from now. In a way I’m morbidly curious about the future, with how bleak and yet how cloudy it is. I talk about the past all the time here because the past is never dead, and like a shambling corpse that has risen from the grave it terrorizes us despite not having a pulse. If the past is a zombie then the future is a horror that has not yet been birthed, and I’m not sure which is worse. The only thing I can say is that I hope to stay alive, despite my own thoughts of suicide.

I’ll be seeing you again, soon.
Things Beyond: November 2024

November 1st, 2024
(Cover by Hisaki Yasuda. Asimov’s, May 1987.)

How are you doing?

I wish I could say the past month has been better for me, but it has not. A big thing is happening in my life, in that today is actually the move-in date for my first apartment. Wow, imagine, at 28, my first apartment. Been taking care of the practical side of things, with assistance: furniture, stuff for the kitchen and bathroom, and of course signing up with utilities. This has been a long time coming, and truth be told I’ve become immensely tired of living with my parents. And yet I’m not happy. Moving into my own place might prove only marginally better than my previous living situation. I don’t make enough to pay for rent so I’ll be bleeding my savings for the following months. The only reason my application even got accepted is my credit score is good. I’ll be living by myself in this one-bedroom apartment. It’ll be very lonely here, as none of my partners live close enough to move in with me, and anyway, with one exception we don’t know each other that well yet. Surely the lack of my parents breathing down my neck will do me some good, but this will be a solitary existence.

Honestly I’ve been tired all the time as of late. My work schedule as of right now is erratic and I find myself going to sleep at six in the morning and waking up after noon. As you may know I have anxiety and depression, and while the former has not been as bad lately, the latter has been worse, or rather more persistent. I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of my job. I’m tired of my imperfect body, and the fact that I can barely sleep. I’m tired of being tired. The US election is in less than a week and honestly I’m sick of this fucking immoral country, and its authorities who have been spending the past couple centuries murdering socialists, queer people, ethnic minority groups, etc. We’re only a quarter into the 21st century but already I feel like almost everything that could go wrong has already gone wrong. And will get worse. I’m normally a pessimist, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I don’t see conditions improving much.

So, go backward or forward, but don’t stay here. I hate it here. I do this blog for fun, and according to stats have written 186,000 words (or about equivalent to Great Expectations in word count) this year alone; but I also do it as a coping mechanism. I don’t do it for readers, or money, because not enough people read this blog or even know about it, despite my spreading word on a few social media platforms. Maybe when I hit 200 subscribers I’ll start a Patreon. Just know I’ve been going at this for two years now because it gives me some degree of emotional security. If not for all these words I would surely have given up a minute ago.

Now, what do we have for reviewing? We have two stories from the ’40s, three from the ’60s, one from the ’80s, one from the ’90s, and one from the 2010s.

For the novellas:
1. “Attitude” by Hal Clement. From the September 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. Feels like it’s been a while since we last talked about Clement, who was one of the first hard SF authors as we now think of the term. Not only was Clement a pioneer, he had a pretty long life and career, remaining active into the beginning of the 21st century. His prose is workmanlike and his human characters tend to be little more than abstractions, but his lectures-as-stories can be enthralling.
2. “Last Summer at Mars Hill” by Elizabeth Hand. From the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novella. Over the past four decades Hand has taken a kind of jack-of-all-trades approach to writing, tackling SF, fantasy, and horror seemingly with equal relish, with even the occasional movie novelization to her credit. (She wrote the novelization of the infamous 2003 Catwoman movie.) “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is one of her most decorated stories.
For the short stories:
1. “Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth. From the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales. Derleth was correspondents with H. P. Lovecraft and could be argued as the person most responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s legacy, as he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in 1939 firstly to reprint his mentor’s fiction. He also wrote quite a bit of fiction in his own right.
2. “The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell. From the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Suspense Stories. One of August Derleth’s biggest discoveries as editor was Ramsey Campbell, whose work Derleth had discovered when he was but a teenager. Campbell’s first collection was published when he was only 18, so that he got his start in weird fiction very early. He would later become a prolific horror novelist.
3. “Nomansland” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Aldiss debuted in the 1950s and would remain active pretty much until his death, which was not too long ago. He would win a Short Fiction Hugo for Hothouse, which is sort of a novel but also a collection of linked stories. We already covered the first story, and now we’re on the second.
4. “Flowers of Edo” by Bruce Sterling. From the May 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Sterling debuted in 1977 when he was barely out of his teens, but he would become one of the defining SF writers of the ’80s. While typically labeled as cyberpunk, Sterling has a surprising versatility, with even early novels like Schismatrix and Islands in the Net being very different from each other.
5. “Soft Clocks” by Yoshio Aramaki. From the January-February 1989 issue of Interzone. First published in 1968. Translated by Kazuko Behrens and Lewis Shiner. Seeing as how the Sterling story takes from Japanese culture, I thought it only right (and perhaps a neat gimmick) to follow up with a story from a Japanese writer. Yoshio Aramaki has been active since the ’60s as an author and critic.
6. “Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.
Won’t you read with me?

Tag: august derleth

The Observatory: This Is Not a Review

Things Beyond: November 2024