March was a bit of a marathon here at SFF Remembrance, but truth be told I had more fun writing about that very old and dusty science fiction than in the past few months. I had been suffering from fatigue, along with some real-life stuff that was getting to me and making it hard to sleep at night. Now I feel somewhat rejuvinated. I feel good enough about reviewing stuff here again, in fact, that I’m bringing back the two-short-stories two-novellas deal, although I’m still keeping it to one serial for the month. The serial in question is a three-parter, being the first appearance of one of the most important SF novels ever written—and yet one that has been totally lost to the sands of time. You might find references to The Skylark of Space if you’re a Star Wars fan, as a point of trivia, since it was this novel that in part invented the space opera subgenre. Edmond Hamilton was writing space opera at shorter lengths around the same time Smith made his debut, but there was nothing on the scale of Smith’s novel before it. Smith “revised” it for its eventual book publication, removing co-author Le Hawkins Garby’s contributions, but we’ll be reading it as it appeared in Amazing Stories. This was a long time coming for me.
For the dates of stories, we’re looking at one from the 1920s, two from the 1950s, one from the 1960s, and one from the 1990s. Both of the stories from the ’50s are from the first half of that decade, which was an incredibly productive period for magazine SF.
For the serial:
The Skylark of Space by E. E. Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby. Serialized in Amazing Stories, August to October 1928. When Smith studied chemistry at the University of Iowa, he didn’t think he would later become one of the pioneering authors of space opera. He didn’t even think he would write fiction, until he talked science fiction with Lee Hawkins Garby and her husband, who were friends from college. This was in 1915, before “science fiction” had even been coined as a label. The Skylark of Space took some years to gestate, but when it appeared in 1928 it made Smith a sensation among the then-niche SF readership. Garby’s contributions were later removed when the novel appeared belatedly in book form.
For the novellas:
“Half-Past Eternity” by John D. MacDonald. From the July 1950 issue of Super Science Stories. Fans of classic crime fiction will be familiar with MacDonald, at least by reputation. His Travis McGee series is one of the most prolific and widely read detective series ever. In 1972 he was given the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. He also wrote a good deal of SF from the late ’40s through the early ’50s, along with nearly every other genre.
“Death in the Promised Land” by Pat Cadigan. From the November 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It was first published in the March 1995 issue of Omni, but that magazine had gone purely online by that point and the Asimov’s printing marked its first physical appearance. Cadigan is arguably the queen of cyberpunk, going back to the ’80s. She’s not as famous as William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, but she really should be more read than she is.
For the short stories:
“Dumb Martian” by John Wyndham. From the July 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s surprising to think that Wyndham had made his SF debut in the early ’30s. His career peak came later than it does with most authors, since he was deep in his forties when The Day of the Triffids was published. The ’50s were a great time to be John Wyndham, between his novels and short stories.
“Timberline” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the September 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This is the fourth installment in Aldiss’s Hothouse series, which was then published as a novel. The series of stories, rather than the novel version, won Aldiss a Hugo, which was certainly a confusing move. It’s been almost a year since I reviewed the last Hothouse story, so here we go.
(Cover by Leo Morey. Amazing Stories, Jaanuary 1934.)
In March 1926, there was a new fiction magazine on newsstands. This in itself was an unexceptional event; after all, there were already quite a few fiction magazines on the market, “the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on.” But this was Amazing Stories, a magazine whose mission statement was to publish a genre of fiction which prior to this didn’t even have a name: science fiction. Sorry, “scientifiction.” The publisher was Experimental Publishing Company, which had already run SF-adjacent magazines, namely Science and Invention and Radio News, and the editor was Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback was born and raised in Luxemburg, but moved to the US as a young man, where he made a name for himself as an inventor, as well as taking major part in the aforementioned magazines. He was also a lousy fiction writer, and even worse when it came to having business sense. What he lacked in those areas, though, he certainly at least tried to compensate with a restless imagination. He was a pioneer in the truest sense, with both the good and bad that come with being on the razor’s edge of innovation. Gernsback ran SF before, but he wanted a whole magazine dedicated to “scientific fiction,” and as he explains in the inaugural editorial: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” The standard for science fiction had been set.
There was science fiction prior to Amazing Stories, of course, and a lot of it. Gernsback himself considered the first real master of SF to be Edgar Allan Poe, who despite being known for his horror also wrote quite a few SF stories—the two not being mutually exclusive. (Nowadays people, including those like Brian Aldiss who very much know their stuff, tend to say SF really started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.) Other practitioners of proto-SF include Jack London, William Hope Hodgson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, and others. Indeed, it’s this wealth of SF published prior to 1926 that would make up the bulk of the material in Amazing Stories for the first few years of its existence. Gernsback especially resorted to reprints of stories and novels by H. G. Wells, who was still alive and well at this point. The business relationship between Gernsback and Wells eventually soured, and unfortunately this was a common occurrence with authors hoping to be published in Amazing Stories. The big problem was that Gernsback seemed to have the money-handling abilities of a gerbil or guinea pig, neglecting to pay his writers for absurdly long periods, even having to be threatened legally to pay up. The money problem got so bad that it’s suspected by some historians that Gernsback declared bankruptcy because he found it preferrable to paying up on his debts. There was an infamous case where H. P. Lovecraft only appeared in Amazing Stories once, with “The Colour Out of Space” (one of his best), on account of Gernsback’s reluctance to pay him, with Lovecraft calling him “Hugo the rat.”
Despite the financial strain, and with Gernsback losing his own magazine only three years after launching it, Amazing Stories somehow persevered. Things looked even rougher when T. O’Conor Sloane, who was managing editor under Gernsback, got kicked upstairs to become editor. Sloane was already in his seventies when he took over, so he was goddamn unspeakably old from the outset. He eventually died in 1940, at the impressive age of 88. If Amazing Stories was shaky in quality under Gernsback, with the original fiction often failing to stand toe-to-toe with the reprints, then the Sloane era made it thoroughly play second-fiddle to newfangled SF magazines, including Astounding Stories and Gernsback’s own Wonder Stories. Within just five years or so the first SF magazine got relegated to publishing second-rate fiction with second-rate paychecks for its writers. E. E. Smith, who had first made his mark in Amazing Stories, eventually jumped ship in favor of Astounding. You also like authors like Jack Williamson, who stayed loyal to Gernsback despite everything. That Amazing Stories made it to the end of the ’30s, and survived well beyond that, is really incredible. It subsisted largely on an audience comprised of young readers and scientist/inventor types. These are very different demographics in some ways, mind you. It continued, under Sloane, as the magazine where science and adventure would (ideally, if not so much in practice) be perfectly balanced.
It wasn’t all bad. In scouting for this month’s selection of short stories to review, I thought the pickings would be slim, but there was still a decent amount of fiction printed in the first ten years or so of this magazine’s life that at least looked intriguing. For instance, how many women would you say wrote for Amazing Stories in those early years? More than you’d think. Gernsback had his shortcomings, but he didn’t seem to have a misogynistic streak worth mentioning, and on occasion he published stories that would be considered positively feminist for the time. So, we have nine stories, the biggest batch of fiction I’ve had to tackle in a bit, all from the 1920s and ’30s. I’m sure some of it will not be very good, and it’s worth mentioning that when reading SF of such vintage it’s important to put yourself in a certain mindset. Still, I think I chose well.
For the short stories:
“The Thing from—’Outside’” by George Allan England. From the April 1926 issue. First published in 1923. Makes sense that we’re starting with a reprint, given the heavy usage of them in early issues. Also, it originally appeared in the Gernsback-edited magazine Science and Invention. England was a prolific pulp adventure writer, real-life adventurer, and failed socialist politician.
“The Fate of the Poseidonia” by Clare Winger Harris. From the June 1927 issue. Harris was, as far as we can tell, the first woman to write for the genre magazines under her own name. She made her debut in Weird Tales in 1926, but more than half of her work went to Amazing Stories. I had meant to review her debut story some months ago, but I struggled to write anything constructive about it.
“The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson. From the December 1928 issue. Williamson might have the single longest career in genre fiction, although Michael Moorcock is getting close. He made his debut in 1928, with this very story, and only stopped with his death in 2006. He always remained pulpy in style to an extent, but he managed to stay relevant for an impressive span of time.
“The Undersea Tube” by L. Taylor Hansen. From the November 1929 issue. Lucile Taylor Hansen was a trained anthropologist whose writing was mostly nonfiction books and articles. She concealed her first name and gender when writing SF early on, likely to separate this side gig (she didn’t write much SF) from her life in academia. She contributed some science articles to Amazing much later.
“The Gostak and the Doshes” by Miles J. Breuer. From the March 1930 issue. Breuer was the son of Czech immigrants, and even wrote for Czech-American publications in Czech rather than English. He was a trained medical doctor, and he spent most of his adult life in Nebraska, working alongside his dad at first. As you can guess, he didn’t write that much SF, on account of his day job.
“Omega” by Amelia Reynolds Long. From the July 1932 issue. Long seemed to have lived her whole life in Pennsylvania, although she would’ve lived on the other end of the state from me. She cut her teeth on writing SF, seemingly using the field as a training ground, but she later moved to detective fiction and poetry. She worked at the William Penn Memorial Museum for 15 years.
“The Lost Language” by David H. Keller. From the January 1934 issue. Of the pre-Campbell SF writers, Keller might be one of the most respected. Like Breuer, he was a trained physician, complete with an MD, and like Breuer he served in the Medical Corps in World War I. He was one of the first American doctors to deal with PTSD in soldiers, which apparently influenced his fiction.
“The Human Pets of Mars” by Leslie F. Stone. From the October 1936 issue. Stone was another pioneer in the field, in that like Harris she published under her real name, although many assumed it was a pseudonym. Her work is shockingly feminist and anti-capitalist for the time. She stopped writing by 1940, having become disillusioned with both the field and the world at large.
“Shifting Seas” by Stanley G. Weinbaum. From the April 1937 issue. For about a year and a half, Weinbaum was arguably the hottest new writer in SF. His untimely death from cancer in December 1935, about 18 months after his debut, means we’ll never know how he might’ve matured as a writer. Ironically he never appeared in Amazing during his life, opting instead for its competitors.
(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.
(Robert E. Howard in 1936. One of the last photos taken of him.)
(As you can guess, this post has to do with mental illness and suicide. My main source for this is Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard, which even with its faults in mind [namely some sloppy editing] is a reliable summary of Howard”s life.)
I consider myself something of a Robert E. Howard fan, and yet I’ve not even come close to reading all of his work. Given that he committed suicide at just thirty years old, Howard had written an intimidatingly large amount over a career that only spanned about a dozen years, between a few novels, dozens of short stories and novellas, and quite a bit of poetry. He was born on January 22, 1906, 120 years ago, and died on June 11, 1936. He was a Texan born and raised; yet despite adhering to the rough-and-tumble ways of his state to an extent, he knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer. While he had an intellectual curiosity, Howard also knew from an early age that he wanted to write pulp fiction, rather than “real” literature. This was during the age of the original pulp magazines, called so because they were printed on cheap paper, sometimes with untrimmed edges. The world of pulp fiction in the 1920s and ’30s was pretty broad, believe it or not, ranging from general adventure fiction to Westerns, detective fiction, science fiction, sports stories, and fantasy. When he was in his teens, Howard tried desperately to write pulp of professional quality, aiming to be published in Adventure, one of the biggest pulp magazines of the time. But he never appeared in Adventure. Instead his first professional sale went to the newfangled Weird Tales in 1924, where Howard would stay as a regular (on top of selling to other magazines) until his death. Just twelve years as a professional, but it was enough.
Howard’s early death and the circumstances of his suicide have haunted the world of fantasy for nearly a century—a haunting made more eerie because for decades we didn’t have much more than hearsay as to what the man himself was like. Howard never lived to give any interviews, and while we now have a number of letters, his character and reputation rested on the words of those who knew him, and in some cases, those who didn’t. Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard, by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine de Camp, and Jane Whittington Griffin, was the first book-length biography of Howard, and it was only published in 1983. L. Sprague de Camp had already written on Howard and was, along with Lin Carter, responsible for public perception of Howard’s work (for both good and ill) starting in the ’50s. De Camp didn’t know Howard personally; they would’ve been contemporaries, had Howard not died when he did. There wouldn’t be another book-length biography of Howard until the 2000s, hence Mark Finn’s book. There is, of course, a saying attributed to Oscar Wilde that there is no such thing as history, only biography. Another way of looking at it is that there’s no such thing as history, only the interpretation of history. There are some basic facts, but what to do with these facts, not to mention the messy details (or, as happens more often than not, the lack of details), is really up to the biographer. Howard’s fate, on top of being tragic no matter how you look at it, has presented a problem for those wanting to know about him for decades, and (to paraphrase William S. Burroughs) there’s no secret Howard himself can tell us.
What’s the story everyone knows? Hester, Howard’s mother, was ill for many years, and in June 1936 she slipped into a coma from which she would never awaken. Howard and his father Isaac knew that this was it. Howard didn’t exactly have an easy relationship with Isaac, what with their arguments and Isaac holding Howard’s choice of profession against him, but his relationship with Hester has long been the subject of controversy. It doesn’t help that like Socrates and Jesus of Narzareth, we don’t really have anything from Hester’s own perspective on the matter—only how others viewed her. While Finn tries to be even-handed in his assessment of Howard as a person (Finn clearly being a fan of Howard’s work), his assessment of Hester is decidedly unflattering. Finn frames Hester as being chronically manipulative, lying to her son on a regular basis throughout his life, as well as trying to push him away from Novalyne Price, the only woman Howard ever loved romantically. (Howard’s relationship with Novalyne is its own can of worms, so we’ll get to that later.)
There are several famous authors who were momma’s boys to varying degrees of unhealthiness, from Marcel Proust to D. H. Lawrence, with Howard being among them. This much is not up for debate. It’s also quite unambiguous, because he admitted as such to more than one person, that Howard planned to not outlive Hester. For her part, Hester’s days were always numbered, a fact she seemingly used as a manipulation tactic. That Howard actually went through with his plan came as a shock to his friends and Novalyne, since even the few who did know about such a plan didn’t believe it was something Howard was that serious about.
Still.
On June 11, the day after he drank coffee for the first (and last) time in his life, Howard went out to his car, pulled out a .380 revolver he had borrowed, and shot himself through the temple. Isaac and others heard the shot and brought Howard into the house, and rather miraculously he lived for another eight hours before dying.
Hester died the next day. Within a span of 24 hours, Isaac witnessed the deaths of both his wife and his son.
Robert E. Howard never married, and he didn’t leave behind any heirs. He did write up a will weeks before his death, which I don’t think is something the average 30-year-old does. The thing about Howard is that, as often (but not always) happens with suicides, he deliberated on ending his life for quite some time before the end. There are about as many reasons for why someone might commit suicide as there are stars in the sky, which I’ve noticed is something people who’ve never grappled with depression or suicidal ideation struggle to understand.
Finn interprets Howard’s suicide as perhaps an inevitability, a foregone conclusion neither Howard nor anyone close to him was equipped to prevent. This might well be true. It’s tempting, especially given how young the man was, to imagine an alternate timeline wherein Howard was able to live even ten or twenty more years—the problem being that there’s no clear path for this alternate ending. There is no simple or singular “if only” scenario in which Howard could’ve spared himself. Some suicides are preventable, but others, even with the gift of hindsight, are not so straightforward. As I said before, a lot of suicides (especially, it must be said, the famous cases) plan their own deaths well in advance, either with utmost secrecy or hidden in plain sight. When Kurt Cobain killed himself, it was in fact not the first time he had attempted suicide, and those close to him knew just how volatile his mental state had been. Ian Curtis of the band Joy Division wrote tracks for the band’s final album which amounted to death poems, with said album releasing after Curtis’s suicide. Ernest Hemingway admitted to his wife, many years before his death, that he would probably commit suicide like his father did.
So it was.
Let’s rewind the film a bit, and by “a bit” I mean a few years. Howard and Novalyne had met in 1933, through a mutual friend, with Novalyne knowing Howard by reputation prior to having met him. She knew Howard as a writer and an eccentric, who while having various pen pals was more standoffish with local people. The good news was that Novalyne was bookish herself, and she had enough willpower to not only hit up Howard, but to get past his conniving mother. The two started dating in 1934, and their relationship lasted about a year, with its ups and downs. The tragedy of their romance was twofold, in that Howard’s neurosis worked to sabotage it, but also that even if they had stayed together, it’s unlikely that Novalyne could’ve prevented Howard’s suicide.
This is not to say nothing good came of their relationship; on the contrary, Novayline inspired some of Howard’s strongest material when it came to writing women. As Finn puts it:
It’s easy to see how Robert could have been attracted to Novalyne. Certainly, she was prettyand intelligent, but her spirit was vital and alive, and not unlike some of Robert’s stronger female characters. Just prior to their first meeting in 1933, Robert sold ‘The Shadow of the Vulture’ in late March, a story that was written in late 1932. It’s tempting to insinuate that Red Sonya was inspired by Novalyne, but it’s more probable that if any character was a response to Robert’s new, outspoken girlfriend, that character was Agnes de Chastillon, the Sword Woman.
Another clear example of Novalyne’s influence was Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, Conan’s strong-willed companion in the novella Red Nails. There’s also the pirate queen Bêlit, in “Queen of the Black Coast,” one of the most beloved Conan stories, who takes on the burly Cimmerian as her lover. It is indeed the one time Conan falls genuinely in love throughout the series, at least as written by Howard.
Conan the Cimmerian is one of the most famous characters in fantasy, and one of the few characters in literature to emerge from the 20th century and garner a permanent legacy. Everybody “knows” who Conan is, even if it’s more often through movies and artwork than through Howard’s writing. You could Conan as a pop culture figure is a mixed child birthed from Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In just four years Howard wrote more than a dozen Conan stories, including a full novel, and that’s not even taking into account the stories published after Howard’s death. Howard had started several series character, including the undead-fighting Puritan Solomon Kane and the proto-Conan figure Bran Mak Morn; but Conan was Howard’s ultimate hero, and soon came to be easily his most popular character ever.
The success of Conan also came to be a thorn in Howard’s side, though, in that he at times grew tired of the character, a fatigue he admitted in letters to friends. Even if we didn’t have those letters, however, it’d be easy enough to infer that sometimes Howard went to Conan simply for the paycheck, since some Conan stories are easily worse than others. I don’t see anyone claim “The Pool of the Black One” or “The Devil in Iron” as their favorite Conan story. The lesser Conan stories are formulaic and not very exciting, frankly. Howard’s growing weariness with his star hero also correlated with the series becoming progressively grimmer, bordering on outright nihilistic. While awesome violence was always a part of the series, and indeed Howard’s fiction more often than not, the tone of latter-day Conan stories was more pessimistic than earlier entries. By the time we get to Beyond the Black River, serialized in 1935, we have one of the most downbeat endings to any pulp story published at the time.
It maybe shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Howard decided to lay Conan to rest as early as 1935. Red Nails was the final Conan story Howard wrote, and its serialization in Weird Tales happened around the same time as Howard’s death. It’s possible that had Howard lived long enough he might’ve eventually returned to Conan, like Arthur Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes, but the truth is that Howard had become disillusioned with the character who had brought him the most attention. He had become interested in writing Westerns, and he might’ve been the first author to have consciously mixed the Western with weird fiction, most notably with the 1932 story “The Horror from the Mound.” This, along with the rare non-supernatural fiction he wrote, spoke more directly of the landscape he knew: that of Texas in the early 20th century.
It’s hard to say what Howard would’ve written had he lived longer, but he seemed convinced, by the end of it, that he could not write anymore. In the last months of his life, after he and Novalyne had broken up, he had made up his mind to kill himself. Novelyne, who had not heard from Howard for some time, had gotten word of his death on June 15, four days after the fact. She had witnessed his declining mental health, including the uncharacteristic growing of a mustache which didn’t suit him, but didn’t act. She recalled things Howard said to no one in particular, repeatedly, like lines in a poem. As Finn writes: “Robert frequently talked of being in his ‘sere and yellow leaf,’ and the phrase always stuck in Novalyne’s craw, for she could never remember where she’d heard it before.” She did some digging and found the line to be from the final act of Macbeth.
The full line is as follows:
I have liv’d long enough: my way of life Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf; And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but, in their stead, Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.
When it comes to bystanders in the wake of a suicide, there tends to be the creeping feeling that a) something could’ve been done, and b) there were warning signs. Howard didn’t exactly try to keep his plan to commit suicide a seqret, and yet nobody close to him was prepared to take extreme measures. I’m not sure if I agree with Finn’s opinion that nothing could’ve been done to avert Howard’s suicide, that his death was inevitable and unpreventable, if still tragic. It’s certainly tragic in that we see someone who was quite talented, and who in his own way had a strong personality; yet this very personality, with such a dim outlook on life, seemed to have doomed him. At the end of his relationsip with Novalyne, Howard lamented that he sometimes wanted to and yet could not be a “normal” man. He couldn’t smoke cigarettes with the lads by the railroad tracks or go to church on Sundays, or work a normal job. If he did those things he would perhaps no longer be Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan and Solomon Kane. He hated the idea of working a normal job, he was ambivalent about Christianity, and he was maybe too devoted to his mother.
For better or worse, only someone like Howard, that man who spent his final days profoundly unhappy, probably believing himself to be a failure, could’ve forever changed fantasy writing the way he did. Which might be the ultimate tragedy of the whole thing.
(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.
(A Canticle for Leibowitz. J. B. Lippincott. Cover by Milton Glaser.)
About a year ago I had read a couple books, which in hindsight I maybe should not have. But then maybe I should’ve. They were Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life and Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. You may know Fisher for his landmark book Capitalist Realism, and of course Ligotti is one of the most esteemed horror writers in living memory. Ghosts of My Life is the follow-up book to Capitalist Realism, being a collection of essays that have to do with (you guessed it) the bleakness of late capitalism, but with Fisher’s analyses of popular media in this context. It also has to do with Fisher’s long-standing battle with depression, which he ultimately lost. Ghosts of My Life was published in 2014, and Fisher committed suicide in 2017, around the same time as the publication of his third book, The Weird and the Eerie. Ligotti, thankfully, is still very much with us, although you might not’ve assumed that since he hasn’t written much in the past decade or so. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, published in 2010, was arguably Ligotti’s last big effort, and interestingly it’s both a nonfiction book and Ligotti’s single longest work. These are both books having to do, directly in the former case and more indirectly in the latter, with depression and pessimism, the former being more autobiographical and the latter being rather philosophical. I recommend them, but only if you’re the sort of person whose mindset is not easily influenced by media you interact with, otherwise they might be too much. I have to admit I’ve not been quite the same since then, but that has less to do with the books and more with the world around me as I was reading them.
These books don’t have much to do directly with science fiction, except for some media covered in Ghosts of My Life, but indirectly they relate to SF in that they speculate on the future—or rather the lack of it. There will, of course, strictly in how time moves, be “a future,” but Fisher and Ligotti posit that “the future,” subjectively, is shrinking, and that being alive in this present moment, we feel this strange paralysis, as if trapped in a quagmire or quicksand of in-the-moment horror. There’s future shock, and then there’s lack-of-future shock. There are psychological, political, and even ecological elements to this. Depending on where you live in the world, which can range in specificity from what continent to even what region of a certain country, you may be feeling any one or all three of these elements to varying degrees of severity. If you’re a farmer in India then you would be feeling, maybe to your despair, future-shrinking of the ecological kind. If you work customer service in the US then you’d be feeling future-shrinking of the psychological kind. Both of these are, of course, influenced by politics. There is always a political (capitalist) reason, although depending on your income and level of education you might not be aware of it, or you might be willfully ignorant of it. Someone living in an urban area in the so-called global north might be blissfully unaware that there is, in fact, a water crisis that’s been ravaging the global south, and which will at some point come for the rest of us. The air becomes just slightly more unclean with each passing year. We see record-breaking heat waves, whose record highs are then soon beaten. There is (although I don’t think anyone wants to admit it) no liberal capitalist means of averting climate catastrophe.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Fisher and Ligotti, in being keenly aware of the sticky situation humanity has made for itself, are both some flavor of socialist. Fisher posits that there was a point somewhere in the not-so-distant past where we could’ve prevented this while Ligotti thinks that, quite the contrary, the cards were always stacked against humanity, by virtue of the inherent curse (so Ligotti argues) of us having been born in the first place. Science fiction doesn’t deal so much with philosophical pessimism, nor is it really much equipped to deal with that kind of philosophy, but it is equipped to deal with bad and lost futures. If anything science fiction is the genre which we can use to speculate on futures which can be prevented, or if not prevented then maybe coped with. The post-apocalypse, in which society as we know it has totally collapsed, leaving an orphaned and maybe savage humanity in its wake, is indeed a hallmark of the genre; and as Fisher famously said (in echoing Fredric Jameson), “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” There’s been no short of post-apocalyptic SF over the decades, although relatively little of it deals with a global machine which is slowly grinding down, rather than stopping suddenly. We do not live in a world that’s likely to experience “the deluge” of A Canticle for Leibowitz, or a civilization-ending virus (although the COVID-19 pandemic gave us a sort of test run for such a scenario) like in I Am Legend. SF during the Cold War reckoned with the possibility of the machine stopping because of nuclear devastation; and while this was plausible in the 1950s, it’s not so plausible now.
So the rules of the game have changed somewhat. Following the “end of history” in the years immediately after the Cold War ended, it was argued (most famously by Francis Fukuyama) that the world of politics had profoundly and irreversibly changed, that the dynamic between capitalism and Soviet-style socialism had come to an end. Since capitalism had come out the “winner,” it was clear (so these people argued) that such a system of money and government will be the status quo for the foreseeable future. In a sense this remains to be the case, even in [current year], given that socialism in China (having effectively replaced the Soviet Union on the world stage) does not provide an adequate alternative to capitalism—indeed it’s barely an alternative at all. During the Cold War there was no shortage of media (think Dr. Strangelove and the Modern English song “I Melt with You”) that posited the world might end because of The Bomb™, but now it’s far more likely the world might end because of the dollar. We live in a world where at the UN, time and again, the US and Israel have voted that food and shelter are not basic human rights. Even water has a price. Modern post-apocalyptic SF, if it’s to speak to readers now and in the future, should ideally reflect this change. There is a bit of a problem, naturally, in that such a kind of SF would presumably be made by those who are disillusioned with a system in which profit takes precedent over human lives. Anyone of pretty much any political leaning would say that of course nuclear war would be a bad thing, but far fewer would both express dissatisfaction with our system and also express a desire for an alternative.
Admittedly I haven’t read as much recent SF as I should, and even with this blog I’ve only been able to get a drop of water out of what has turned out to be a rather sizable pond. Very recently I reviewed Rebecca Campbell’s award-winning “An Important Failure,” which is about pursuing one’s lifelong passion in the midst of slow-burning environmental collapse. Most memorably I got to read Naomi Kritzer’s stunning (and surprisingly optimistic) “The Year Without Sunshine,” which tackles a plausible scenario in which a long-term and widespread power outage results in the formation of a makeshift socialist community. God knows how many novels and short stories are worth reading which cover similar ground, and that’s not even getting into the speculative articles. Not too many, I imagine, because, as I said, there would be fewer authors willing to tackle this subject in such a way; but at the same time there still probably isn’t enough, especially in perspectives from the global south. If we can’t even create the future then we can at least learn to live with the horrible, at times unbearable present. When we say the future is getting dimmer, we mean it’s getting bleaker, but also harder to perceive. Science fiction is not meant to be predictive, but it should tell us something about where we might be heading. I don’t know where we’re heading myself. For all I know we might be heading nowhere, and fast. To paraphrase the opening line of Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, it’s dark, even though night has ended.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Satellite, December 1956.)
Merry Christmas, happy birthday to me, and all that.
People who keep up with my posts may have noticed that I missed a couple things last month, including what was to be the start of the second serialized novel, Kuttner and Moore’s Fury. Let’s say I’ve been slow about it. Generally I’ve been slower about keeping up with this blog than I was a year ago, and there could be a few reasons for this, but the point is that I’ve come to understand I’m not as on top of my own blog as I once was. I’ve slowed down with the “required” reading, and I’ve been slower about writing, although (not to toot my own horn) I still write here more than some other fan writers I know. Maybe nowadays the load I give myself is just a bit too much, especially since I’ve also been wanting to get into writing professionally, for that bit of extra money, only I’ve not been able to find the time and/or motivation for it. So, I’ll lighten the load a bit. From now on I’ll only be covering one serial a month, regardless of length. Of course, if the serial is four parts or longer this won’t make a difference, but a lot of serials are three-parters, which should give me an extra day to myself. Other than that, it’s gonna be business as usual.
What do we have on our table? All science fiction, which isn’t very diverse, but when these stories were published is certainly more diverse. One story from the 1940s, one from the ’50s, one from the ’60s, one from the ’70s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.
For the serial:
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:
“Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst” by Kage Baker. From the October-November 2003 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Baker had spent much of her adult life working in insurance and with theatre as her primary hobby, before pivoting to writing SF in her forties. No doubt she would still be writing SF today, had she not died all too soon in 2010. Still, for about a dozen years she wrote furiously, with her big series following a team of time-traveling secret agents.
“The Dragon Masters” by Jack Vance. From the August 1962 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Winner of the Hugo for Best Short Fiction. This is a reread, although I only have a vague memory of having read it in the first place, and that was without Jack Gaughan’s accompanying artwork. Despite what the title might make you think, “The Dragon Masters” is pure planetary SF, albeit with fantasy-esque coloring that Vance had become known for at this point.
For the short stories:
“An Important Failure” by Rebecca Campbell. From the August 2020 issue of Clarkesworld. Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Born and raised in Canada but now living in the UK, Campbell has written only one novel so far, which in fact was her first SF writing of any sort. Good news is she’s been somewhat prolific in writing short stories and novellas over the past decade.
“The Earth Dwellers” by Nancy Kress. From the December 1976 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is the third time now that I’ve come to Kress, and why not? Her career now spands nearly half a century, and her stories, if not always entertaining, often provide some food for thought. I know nothing about “The Earth Dwellers,” except it marked Kress’s very first appearance in the field.
For the complete novel:
A Glass of Darkness by Philip K. Dick. From the December 1956 issue of Satellite Science Fiction. This book sounds unfamiliar, even for seasoned Dick fans, although it may ring a bell under its book title: The Cosmic Puppets. Dick had burst onto the scene in the early ’50s as one of the most promising short-story writers at the time, in a generation that included such bright newcomers as Robert Sheckley, Algis Budrys, and Katherine MacLean. It only stood to reason, then, that while writing short stories nonstop was all well and good, writing a novel was the logical next step. A Glass of Darkness wasn’t the first novel Dick wrote, but it was the first to be published.
(This post will be discussing spoilers for Carnival of Souls, including the twist ending, so if you haven’t seen the movie already I suggest you do just that before reading any further.)
I was supposed to write a review two goddamn days ago, except I realized that I had made a mistake and somehow gotten my own schedule wrong. I had read the first installment of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno, except I was actually supposed to read Arthur C. Clarke’s “Against the Fall of Night.” So, no review happened for the 3rd or the 4th. With any luck I’ll get around to Clarke’s novella sometime this month, and of course you can expect my review of Inferno (the first stretch) very soon, as in tomorrow or the day after. For now, let’s content ourselves with an editorial I had in mind for last month but couldn’t find the time or proper motivation for at the time, a not-review of a certain cult classic. Carnival of Souls is one of the best horror movies of the ’60s, almost in spite of itself, being made on a very low budget by a crew comprised of people who had not worked on a feature film before, and whose cast was similarly comprised of non-actors and people (including its lead actress) who would not have a future in movies. There’s a lot to say about it, but one can only say so much without giving away the whole plot, so it’s best to start at the ending and then slingshot back to the beginning. It’s that kind of movie.
Mary Henry is dead, to begin with. We start with a logo for Harcourt Productions, which I have to think was made specifically for this movie, since this is the only movie ever to be produced by this company. Before said logo can even fade to black we’re met with a jarring (maybe deliberate, maybe not) shift in the form of the opening scene: an impromptu drag race between two cars, one filled with dudes, the other filled with Mary and her gal pals. A few things are going on in this first scene, which seems to me an effort in disorienting the viewer. At the very beginning here, Mary doesn’t say anything, and she has kind of this quizzical expression on her face, as if she’s unsure about the race but is too shy to discourage her friends from taking part. Her skepticism is more than justified, since it takes all of about one minute for the race to go wrong, as the cars go across a rickety bridge and the girls’ car tips over into the river below. You would think the girls, if not killed from the impact, would at least drown, and you’d be right. A rescue team comes in, more to salvage the car than anything, and if you pay attention to the dialogue you can hear that they’ve been looking for three hours. Obviously nobody can be alive still.
Except for Mary—or so it seems.
(The film’s director as a ghostly visitor.)
Wet from the river and caked with mud, Mary walks dizzily out of the water, as if some kind of ghoul emerging from a swamp, quite miraculously to everyone around her. It’s telling that when asked about what happened Mary can only say, “I don’t remember.” It’s her first line of dialogue, and in a striking formal decision it’s spoken offscreen. From this scene to the next there’s an unexplainable gap in time, and it’s only then that we see Mary talk for the first time. Having apparently recovered from the accident, Mary takes up a job as an organist for a church in Utah, despite being irreligious herself. The man at the organ factory doesn’t mind Mary’s disposition much, but the minister at the church where she’ll be working is more concerned. (We know that this must take place in fantasy land because somehow Mary is able to afford rent with a non-job like “church organist.”) Interestingly, the only woman of note that Mary interacts with throughout the rest of the movie is Mrs. Thomas, her landlady; otherwise she’s beholden to a handful of male figures. These men fall on a spectrum that ranges from uselessly benevolent to openly hostile, but the point is that they either try and fail to help her or are looking to make her day worse. The worst of these might be John, the neighbor in the apartment building, who unsubtly creeps on Mary and tries to get her in his bed at all costs. If this movie took place in modern times, John would be an incel and/or one of those guys who follows macho influencers for “dating advice.”
(Mary and a typically pushy John.)
Let’s take a step back to talk about the acting and directing, since this is a movie that does a lot with only a few resources, and also where a lot happens despite clocking in at just under 80 minutes. The director, Herk Harvey, had experience as a filmmaker from making PSA-type shorts about urban and industrial areas, with Carnival of Souls being his first and only narrative feature. He directed, produced, worked on the script with John Clifford, and even plays a major role as an actor here, as a pale-skinned ghostly man who stalks Mary throughout the film. Like I said earlier, the people acting in Carnival of Souls have never been in a movie before, with maybe an exception or two in there. This is quite a surprise with Candace Hilligoss as Mary, since she gives unquestionably one of the defining lead performances of ’60s horror, and her presence gives one the impression that she could’ve been in a hundred movies. The way she often stares off into the distance, dissociating, or sometimes how she cranes her neck like a flightless bird, gives one the impression of Mary being like a confused animal. The closest reference point I can think of with Hilligoss’s performance is Elsa Lanchester’s performance as the bride in Bride of Frankenstein, where similarly Lanchester plays a worried and at times frightened animal in human skin. Lanchester as the bride only shows up for a few minutes in her movie, nevertheless leaving a mark on people’s imaginations; but luckily for us we have a whole movie to spend with Hilligoss as Mary.
Harvey and his crew shot on location in Utah, on a budget of just over $30,000 in 1962 money, and since they obviously couldn’t afford sets they shot the scenes of the titular carnival at the Saltair Pavilion (specifically Saltair II), a resort that hit hard times during the Great Depression and which wss finally abandoned a few years before Carnival of Souls was shot. Securing a permit for shooting at Saltair II was cheap and easy. There are a few scenes set in urban locations, namely Salt Lake City, but the most memorable stuff in this movie has to do with the shabby apartment building Mary lives in and the industrial shithole just out her window, namely the abandoned carnival that haunts her dreams. The lack of sets, combined with harsh lighting and industrial locales, gives one the feeling that maybe David Lynch had taken notes from this movie during the long process of making Eraserhead. Mary, being a ghost unbeknownst to herself, lives in a world that itself comes off as ghostly. Of course, it is not the abandoned carnival which turns out to be haunted, but rather Mary. I have a soft spot for ghost stories in which a person instead of a place is haunted, either because the person is a member of the undead or attracts the undead like a magnet. Harvey and Clifford took inspiration from the Ambrose Bierce story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which (spoilers for a short story that’s over a century old) is similarly about someone who seemingly survives being killed, only to find out afterward that they are a ghost. So we have a ghost who unwittingly haunts people, and who herself is haunted by a dead (abandoned) place. I know it can be a little hard to believe, given its cheap and grimy aesthetics, but this is an intelligently crafted film.
(An exterior shot of Saltair II.)
If taken literally, Carnival of Souls is a spooky story about a woman who thinks she has cheated death, but if you try even slightly you’ll find that this is a resonant and prescient study of a woman suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness, trying to live in a world dominated by “normal” people. It is at the very least explicitly about a woman who, following her accident, lives in a permanent state of disconnect from the rest of humanity, a kind of switch being flipped in her brain which she may or may not be able to flip back the other way. It’s ambiguous if Mary’s unusual mental state is something she had before the accident or if it’s brought on from trauma, but regardless she acts as if being around people for longer than short controlled bursts is a burden on her—to other people’s dismay. As the minister says during their first meeting, “But my dear, you cannot live in isolation from the human race, you know.” At first Mary is content to live on her own, with her crummy job and not having any friends, but eventually the loneliness does get to her; but at the same time she has some unwanted company, with John from the side of the living and the pale man from that of the dead. She quite literally phases in and out of reality at a few points in the movie, where people can’t see or hear her and she fully becomes a ghost. She’s stuck in a liminal position, between wanting but being unable to socialize with the living while also being scared of the ghosts she sees dancing at the carnival at night. During the daytime the carnival just a normal industrial area, totally empty of human life; but while there’s no ghost who can torment her here during the day, it’s eerily missing that human touch. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the sequence at the halfway point of the movie, where Mary explores Saltair II, might be my favorite.
(Mary in a huge pipe, in one of the more memorable shots.)
The most helpful character is Dr. Samuels, a psychologist who just so happens to run into Mary during one of her daytime scares. (How is she paying for this? Is she paying for it? Does Samuels put their first session on the house? We don’t ask these questions when watching a movie.) The best thing he does is allow Mary to articulate her state of mind, especially her strange (to other characters) indifference to intimacy with those of the opposite sex. The language wasn’t around at the time, but the idea is that Mary is queer, by virtue of being asexual and possibly also aromantic. This quirk with her sexuality is treated as unusual, but not harmful, which for a movie of this vintage is pretty forward-thinking. Indeed what modern viewers might appreciate most about Carnival of Souls, more than what it’s able to accomplish on a tight budget and its capacity for genuine chills, is its sympathetic depiction of someone who is both mentally ill and outside the realm of cisgender-heterosexual normality. We have a complex figure with Mary, helped by Hilligoss’s nuanced performance, a woman who is tormented by men who either shun her or try to coerce her into unwanted sex—and that’s not even going into the literal ghouls following her. The ending of the movie is obviously meant to be taken as eerie, but Mary’s ultimate fate, as a ghost who gets dragged screaming into the afterlife, also has a tragic aspect. The “dead all along” twist has arguably been done with more elegance in one or two other movies, but the inevitability of it in Carnival of Souls is crushing.
Carnival of Souls is not a perfect movie by any means; on the contrary it’s pretty rough around the edges. Actually the whole movie is rough. The lighting is amateurish at times, the acting is a mixed bag (understandably), there are a few shots I can think of that could’ve used another take, and of course someone watching this today would find the twist to be pretty obvious—although this was not so much the case back then. As typically goes with B-movies, it languished in obscurity for a couple decades, until it was revived thanks to late-night TV airings and being discovered by the international arthouse crowd. Roger Ebert wrote a positive review of it in 1989. It’s now in the Criterion Collection. I’ve seen three or four times myself over the years, and each time I’ve found more small and subtle things about it to like. This is a pulpy exploration of mental illness via supernatural horror, which nowadays feels almost overdone as one of the genre’s many modes. But trust me, it’s a good one.
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.
(Dark Forces. Cover by One Plus One Studio. The Viking Press, 1980.)
Something I don’t typically get to write about here is the topic of original anthologies, which is to say anthologies of short fiction comprised of material never before published. Of course, said fiction could later be reprinted in magazines, as has happened many times, but the implied purpose of an original anthology is fundamentally different from that of its sibling, the reprint anthology. Both involve similar work, with an editor trying to procure stories from authors or authors’ estates, as well as reading dozens upon dozens of stories, most of which end up not being worth printing. There’s the question of how many words/pages can be crammed between two covers. There’s the question of pricing, because an anthology will pretty much always be more expensive than a single magazine issue. Nowadays anthologies and magazines fill respective niches and try not to step on each other’s toes, since it’s no longer a problem of what can be printed in magazines, whereas in the days before Fortnite and even the internet there was the (true, at least up to a point) conventional narrative that editors and publishers of original anthologies were allowed to be more risqué than their magazine counterparts.
When Dangerous Visions hit shelves in 1967, its key appeal (at least for American readers) was that it was jam-packed with stories that could not be published in magazines of the era, on account of being too edgy, experimental, etc. You had a thick book (over 500 pages) from a mainstream publisher (Doubleday) with an all-star cast of authors, all of whom at least claimed to be putting forth their most mind-bending and transgressive material yet. You had such top talents as Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and so on, and commissioning this stuff could not have been cheap. The gambit paid off in spades, though. Dangerous Visions sold very well, remains in print to this day (a rarity for an anthology, especially an original one), and it even won a special Hugo. That Harlan Ellison, the editor, never quite recaptured that lightning, is beside the point. Not every story was a winner, but Dangerous Visions was the right book that entered the market at just the right time, serving as a harbinger of the New Wave. Just as importantly, publishers realized that there was some money to be made with original anthologies—maybe not on the same scale as Dangerous Visions, but rather cheap paperbacks of maybe half the size and half the number of stories; and maybe these books wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel like their inspiration did, but instead took on more humble mission statements. You can have editors who are maybe not as discerning as Ellison was, who would also get the work done in a timelier fashion. It was a matter of quantity over quality.
There a meteor shower, or maybe a oversaturation, of original paperback anthologies from the late ’60s through much of the ’70s, until that particular bubble burst. These were books that often focused on science fiction, rather than fantasy or horror, although there was a trickle-down effect with those other genres. Still, standards had dripped, in large part (although he was not the sole offender) due to Roger Elwood’s extremely prolific tenure as editor for a few different publishers; the number of anthologies he edited between 1972 and 1976 alone is staggering. While he was able to procure work from big names, this work ran a good chance of being mid- to low-tier stuff that would’ve likely stayed on the shelf. A major exception was Epoch, which Elwood co-edited with Robert Silverberg, a lavish and well-received book, placing first in the Locus poll that year; but this is indeed an exception that proves the rule. By the end of the ’70s the market for original anthologies had inevitably gone into decline.
Meanwhile, in the waning days of the original anthology, Kirby McCauley made his living as a New York-based literary agent with some big talent on his hands. By 1980 he had already edited one well-received original horror anthology, with 1976’s Frights, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection. Frights was a hardcover original from St. Martin’s Press with a nice wraparound cover, but while McCauley procured stories by some of the top talent in horror at the time, including Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman, he found that he wanted to go one step further. The introduction for Dark Forces makes McCauley’s intentions with this bulky new anthology clear. McCauley’s inspiration was twofold, between August Derleth’s work as head of Arkham House and wanting to make a horror-themed counterpart to Dangerous Visions. Arkham House in its prime printed hardcover volumes with exquisite covers, all these being focused on horror, SF, and dark fantasy, from reprints of H. P. Lovecraft’s work to collections of never-before-published fiction by fresh young writers. McCauley grew up on books of horror that Derleth had edited, so in that way he overtly pays tribute to a fallen (Derleth had died in 1971) master of the field. The relationship that Dark Forces has with Dangerous Visions is more complicated, however, as there are a few major differences in how these books’ respective editors went about their businesses.
Consider that when Harlan Ellison edited Dangerous Visions, a process that took about two years, he was coming at it from the perspective of a reasonably successful author, which is to say he was a writer, first and foremost, as opposed to an editor or agent. This lack of experience with editing eventually came back to bite Ellison in the ass, with the shitshow that was the making of Again, Dangerous Visions, and far more infamously with The Last Dangerous Visions; but in the ’60s, it was novel for a writer with practically no editing experience to work with his fellow writers in such a way. Conversely, McCauley had already proven his ability with an original anthology, plus a couple reprint anthologies, and he was enough of a professional that he understood how to work with writers as people, and not just as practitioners of a certain craft. In the introduction he recounts his encouraging relationship with Stephen King while the latter wrote (first as a novelette, then ballooning into a long novella) The Mist. He also recounts having a get-together with Isaac Bashevis Singer in the latter’s apartment (they were both New Yorkers, and thus there had to be some inherent sense of kinship there), just months before Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. King and Singer are radically different in just about every way, in work ethic, style, and worldview, the former a flaming-liberal New Englander and the latter a conservative Polish-Jewish immigrant; yet McCauley makes it appear easy to work with both.
You may have noticed also that Singer is not a name that comes up much, if at all, in horror circles, because while a good portion of his fiction involves the supernatural, he’s not a “horror writer.” Thus we have another big difference between Dangerous Visions and Dark Forces, because while Ellison reached out to everyone in the SF field he could get his hands on, McCauley reached outside the field of horror and dark fantasy, the result being that there are authors in Dark Forces who are not primarily horror writers, and there are even a few who are known to be “literary” types. It’s not so unusual today, but back in 1980 it was a novelty for acclaimed novelist (and prolific tweeter) Joyce Carol Oates to appear in a horror anthology. You have some of the usual suspects of horror from that period (King, Campbell, even Robert Bloch late in his career, etc.), but you also have a really left-field choice like Davis Grubb, who was known at the time as author of The Night of the Hunter. You have writers like Edward Bryant and Joe Haldeman who, while they have sometimes written horror, are much more known for writing science fiction. You have a surprise appearance from Ray Bradbury, who by 1980 had long since entered the literary mainstream, and who also didn’t write much of anything at this point in his career. One can have gripes with who made it in and especially who didn’t (there are only two female authors here, Oates and Lisa Tuttle), but I can readily believe McCauley when he says he tried getting stories from everyone.
It’s also worth mentioning that McCauley didn’t construct Dark Forces with the intention of it being a boundary-pusher for the field of horror (he even explicitly says he didn’t want it to be “as revolutionary” as Dangerous Visions), and this ends up being to its benefit. True, there are a few stories here that may have been transgressive for 1980 (I’m thinking of Theodore Sturgeon’s tale of venereal agony, “Vengeance Is.,” and if I had a nickel for every “pregnant man” story in this book, I would have two nickels), but being extra-gross or what have you was not the name of the game. What might be Dark Forces‘s secret weapon and the biggest reason for its having aged pretty well is how its contents cover pretty close to the whole span of short horror literature up to circa 1980. While we don’t have much dark fantasy a la Robert E. Howard’s weird Conan stories, or the “extreme” horror that would start making the rounds in the proceeding years, there’s a great deal of variety in these 500 pages. We have traditional ghost stories such as Singer’s “The Enemy,” a rendering of the Sweeny Todd narrative with Robert Aickman’s “Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale,” a cautionary tale of one unlucky busybody and a nest of vampiric creatures with Campbell’s “The Brood,” some rural “redneck” horror with Grubb and Manly Wade Wellman’s stories, and so on. There are also a couple non-supernatural tales of terror, as with Oates’s “The Bingo Master” (a personal fave of mine) and Bloch’s “The Night Before Christmas.” There are even a couple stories that fall into a certain genre that’s become rare in recent decades, that being the Christian allegory, with Gene Wolfe’s “The Detective of Dreams” and Russell Kirk’s “The Peculiar Demesne.”
And then there’s The Mist.
A story that “gets away” from the author, as it were, can sometimes be a bloated abomination, but in the case of The Mist we have one of King’s best and most tightly wound stories. Indeed King’s bad habits are pretty much absent here, and the fact that he’s able to reconcile ’50s B-movie monster action with genuine eeriness shows the level of craftmanship he’s capable of when he stops fucking around and focuses on what really matters. While the movie adaptation has a radically different ending (one that many, including King himself, prefer), I do have a soft spot for the novella’s ambiguity and cautious optimism. It was a simple choice for McCauley to put the longest story last, making The Mist the grand finale of Dark Forces, but it’s an example of how sometimes the simplest choice is also the best. Unlike the King collection Skeleton Crew, which sees The Mist as the protracted opening salvo, its position as the closing story of Dark Forces gives one the impression that the whole book had been building up to this moment. It was risky to include such a long story here (it takes up about 1/4 of the book), since if it failed then it would majorly tarnish what is otherwise a good read and leave a sour taste in the reader’s mouth; thankfully The Mist was a success, and has become one of King’s most beloved stories.
Dangerous Visions has, as far as I can tell, never gone out of print, although sadly the same can’t be said for Dark Forces. Anthologies, and especially original anthologies, have a bad tendency to have one or maybe two print runs, then go out of stock until the end of time. The only time Dark Forces has been reprinted this century was a super-expensive limited edition from Lonely Road Books in 2007. Bantam apparently did a paperback printing of Dark Forces in the early ’80s, but otherwise it’s only ever been published in hardcover in the US. It could be that Dangerous Visions was such a monolith at the time of its release, and has gone down as such an important entry in SF history, that its status (despite understandable attempts to knock it down a peg, especially as it continues to show its age more and more) has been more or less secured for the foreseeable future. Dark Forces is arguably a better book and set a better precedent (it served as an inspiration for Clive Barker to get into writing horror, and as we all know, the rest of that is history), but it also now reads, with hindsight, as one of the last big gasps for short fiction as a significant player in the realm of horror. Starting in the ’70s, both novels and movies started taking larger slices out of the pie in terms of what “mattered” for innovation and trends in horror, a field that historically largely hinged on the short story and novella. There would be major practicioners of the short horror story (see Barker, also Thomas Ligotti) to come after 1980, but Dark Forces celebrated (again, with hindsight) the short story as a form with authors who are, by and large, happiest and at their best when writing short stories and novellas.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 