Not much to say this month, except of course it is the start of Pride Month. For me Pride Month is every month of the year, so I don’t put that much significance in it; maybe I would if I went out more, attended some events in my city, which I should probably do. I’m only now realizing, as I’m finishing up this forecast post, that I could’ve also given more space to authors I know to be queer, but oh well. I focus more on old-timey SF (What even counts as “old-timey” at this point, like pre-2000?), and unfortunately there aren’t many confirmed-queer authors from before maybe the ’70s. You’ve got Frank M. Robinson, who was gay. Ditto for Samuel R. Delany. I’ve heard from a respectable source that Theodore Sturgeon was bisexual, but I’ve yet to dig into this and find actual evidence of it. Marion Zimmer Bradley was queer, but she was also a heinous sex criminal so I’m not sure about counting that. Joanna Russ was a lesbian, although I forget when she came out. You can see what my problem is there.
More so I thought about using this month to inject a bit more variety into my reviewing plate, so that it’s not all science fiction. Obviously I have to finish the Zelazny serial, which I’m liking quite a bit so far, but I also got the itch to tackle some sword-and-sorcery fantasy that isn’t Fritz Leiber or Robert E. Howard. Fuck it, John Jakes’s Brak the Barbarian. We’re also finally returning to Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse “series” with the third entry, this “series” being very much science-fantasy rather than straight SF. We’ve got a ’50s Cold War story from Philip K. Dick, who I love, and who in the ’50s seemed preoccupied with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Relatable. Last but not least I’ve got a cyberpunk novella from Pat Cadigan, who on reflection I think is one of my favorite short fiction writers from the ’80s and ’90s. Then there’s Sonya Dorman, who I know I’ve read a few stories from in passing but I’ve not actively sought her out until now.
Going by decade, we’ve got one story from the 1950s, two from the 1960s, two from the 1970s, and one from the 1990s.
For the serials:
Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, June to August 1975. Zelazny is one of the most influential SFF writers of all time, his mark being apparent on the likes of George R. R. Martin and (God help us) Neil Gaiman; and yet despite a couple generations of writers (especially those of fantasy) owing a debt to Zelazny, much of his work remains obscure or simply out of print, including this standalone novel.
Witch of the Four Winds by John Jakes. Serialized in Fantastic, November to December 1963. Jakes later found mainstream success writing historical fiction, but his early career was defined by SF and especially fantasy. During the sword-and-sorcery revival of the ’60s Jakes came in with his own sword-swinging hero, Brak the Barbarian. This serial got published in book form under the much worse title of Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress.
For the novellas:
“Fool to Believe” by Pat Cadigan. From the February 1990 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. When it comes to naming the architects of cyberpunk the first to come up are William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, but Cadigan was also instrumental in shaping the movement. She had actually made her debut in the late ’70s, but as she did not write her first novel for several years she initially made her name as one of the best short fiction writers in the field.
“Undergrowth” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the July 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Aldiss started as a brave new talent in the UK before quickly (much faster than most of his peers, it must be said) making a name for himself in the US. “Undergrowth” is the third Hothouse story, out of five, all of which would then form the “novel” Hothouse. Aldiss won a Hugo for these stories collectively, as opposed to the novel version.
For the short stories:
“Breakfast at Twilight” by Philip K. Dick. From the July 1954 issue of Amazing Stories. In the ’50s, before he turned more to writing novels, Dick was one of the most prolific and awesome short story writers in the field. Not everything he churned out was a hit, but he had a respectably high batting average. Of course it’s very hard for me to be objective with Dick since he’s one of my favorites.
“Journey” by Sonya Dorman. From the November-December 1972 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Dorman was a poet as well as a short story writer who only wrote SF sporadically, and mostly for original anthologies, even appearing in Dangerous Visions. Most of her short fiction has been reprinted rarely or not at all, with “Journey” never appearing in book form as of yet.
(Fritz Leiber and Katherine MacLean at the 1952 Worldcon.)
When you read and review old science fiction as a hobby, at some point you have to ask a certain question: “How come so many of these authors from fifty to a hundred years ago, who if fan letters are to be believed were seen as giants in their day, are obscure now?” This inevitably leads to some really boring follow-up questions, such as “What belongs in the science fiction literary canon?” and “Can there even exist such a canon in the first place?” These are boring questions in themselves, if only because they’re so old that the questions have crow’s feet and grey hairs, but they do at least imply something about SF literature that is arguably unique to it, which is that, far more than with fantasy or horror, the SF “canon” is fluid. There are exceptions, but even these exceptions (which I’ll get into) are far from immune to criticism, especially from younger fans, to the point where even the most rock-solid canonical author’s reputation could erode to the point where they’re, at best, considered something of a sore subject. We actually see this happening with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov in real time, and I think it’s only a matter of time before Arthur C. Clarke’s reputation takes a serious hit—more for what seem to be a few skeletons in his closet than the importance of his writing. The reality is that the people (well, usually men) most influential in the development of SF as its own genre are only human, which is a diplomatic way of saying that these people have issues. That SF fandom has been, in all honesty, more proactive in recent years about how it should deal with canonical works and authors than some others is a testament to the fandom’s—and by extension the genre’s—ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Of the genres that involve fantastic or supernatural events, SF is the youngest, the most rebellious, and the most likely to question its own masters. Unlike fantasy and especially horror, which are (in my opinion) implicitly conservative genres in that they’re prone to defending the status quo against all sorts of change (the oldest fear, as Lovecraft puts it, is fear of the unknown), SF at least ideally wants the status quo to be shaken and even shattered. There’s a reason why most notable works of dystopian and utopian fiction are SF and not fantasy: they look on the status quo that is our world and cast either a hopeful or pessimistic light, or in the case of something like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a cautiously optimistic light. The single most famous work of fantasy (at least of the 20th century), The Lord of the Rings, is ultimately a story wherein the good guys bring back the status quo as much as they’re able to; it’s a story about a “rightful” monarch returning to the throne that he very obviously “deserves.” Yet perhaps its closest SFnal equivalent, the Dune series, shows the other side of the coin, wherein a young ruler-to-be fulfills a prophecy and the results are catastrophic. Frank Herbert had his own issues, namely his homophobia, but his staunch ambivalence towards authority figures clashes with Tolkien’s belief that there’s a “correct” ruler and that the status quo is something worth fighting for. SF, at its core, is about rejecting authority, which makes the considerable swath of conservative SF fans a bit perplexing. It might be more accurate to say SF is all about changes, whether they be for good or ill. In horror especially, though I love that genre dearly, pretty much any change that comes the protagonist’s way is to be taken as a threat; but for SF this is not so. The question is, then, what do you do with a genre that’s always changing? Or rather, what do you do with its relics?
When E. E. “Doc” Smith made his debut in 1928 with The Skylark of Space, it changed what was possible, for nobody had ever seen a spacefaring adventure of this scale before. “Space opera” was not even in our lexicon yet. There’d been stories about traveling beyond Earth, for example going to Earth’s moon, but there wasn’t anything in SF up to that point that was on the same scale of what Smith was doing. Soon what seemed like a one-off thing at first became a series, and then came the Lensman series, and then the rest was history—up to a point. From the tail end of the ’20s to his death in 1965, Smith was immensely popular with SF fandom; and yet he remained totally unknown outside of that ultimately small pocket of readers. When Smith died, the wind did not change direction, nor did the sun shine any less bright, nor did the seas wax and wane any differently. There used to be people who loved reading E. E. Smith, but they’re all dead now. His work stands now as a bunch of museum pieces, I would say for the simple reason that he was not a good writer; he was innovative, but that’s not the same thing as being good, although we have a bad habit of thinking a work of art must be good to also be innovative. When Alexei and Cory Panshin wrote The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence, a big Hugo-winning book that took over a decade for them to write, they felt the need to defend Smith, for fear that his reputation was going down the shitter, which it was. The World Beyond the Hill came out in 1989, and since then the SF world has very much moved beyond Smith. This is a case where someone was treated as canonical by the end of their life, only to gather dust and at times derision for decades afterward, for the straightforward reason that the author’s work does not hold up to modern scrutiny. Time has been unkind to E. E. Smith and some others of his ilk.
So someone loses their canonical status because they’re simply not that good a writer. It happens. But then what happens when you have someone who by all rights should retain that canonical status, yet who nowadays is somewhat and unjustifiably forgotten? There are too many examples of such a phenomenon to list. I said before that SF is prone to questioning its masters, as well as doing a good job of tossing aside work that no longer rings as good or true; yet SF is equally prone to forgetting its best. One of the most glaring examples of this has to be Fritz Leiber, whose fantasy work is still in print, albeit not that easy to find, but whose SF has been relegated to the museum. I’ve written about Leiber enough here already so that I don’t wanna repeat myself too much, but it’s hard to overstate, from the late ’30s until close to his death in 1992, how game-changing Leiber was. Not only was he an innovator in heroic fantasy, his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series even getting parodied in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, but he was one of the finest wordsmiths of his generation when it came to SF, fantasy, and horror. Indeed he’s one of the few authors who handled all three genres with more or less equal craftsmanship. He won multiple Hugos, both during his life and also one or two Retro Hugos, and he’s also one of the few people to be a Guest of Honor at Worldcon more than once, in 1951 and again in 1979. Yet nowadays you’d be hard-pressed to find Leiber’s books, even at your local used bookstore, with many of his books straight-up being out of print. If Amazon and Goodreads numbers are anything to go by (and admittedly you should take a pinch of salt with those sources), barely anyone today reads Leiber. This is rather hard to justify. Mind you that the man was not perfect, between his alcoholism and at times messy relationships, and the fact that not everything he wrote was good (The Wanderer is enough proof of that); but surely he deserves better than this.
Sometimes an author falling into obscurity has nothing to do with the quality of their work or the moral fiber of their character; actually if anything we’ve learned that you can be a real piece of shit as a human being and millions of people will still read your books. (We really have to confront people more aggressively on why they feel justified supporting J. K. Rowling in any way.) It seems to me that losing canonical status has at least as much to do with bad timing, or circumstances beyond the author’s control, as it does with the author’s own actions. It could also have to do with the fact that SF fandom today is almost unimaginably larger and more varied in its makeup than even a few decades ago. Being hot shit among SF readers in 1980 does not carry the same weight as being hot shit among SF readers in 2025, because now there are so many more people from different backgrounds who read SF regularly. Fans tolerated or didn’t even know about Asimov’s harassing of female authors and fans when he was alive, but rest assured he would not be able to get away with such foolishness today. This is a good thing, mind you. We’re doing a much better job of holding each other accountable now than before. This then presents another problem, though. How do you rescue works and authors who once had canonical status from oblivion? Another problem is, what do we do with authors who nowadays are elder statesmen? Will someone who is considered a big deal today still be remembered in another twenty-to-thirty years? Will we forget about Ted Chiang, or John Scalzi, or Martha Wells? Will there be some invisible executioner with a line of riflemen, ready to take aim and fire? Who gets to be remembered? How much control do you have over your own legacy? One can certainly do a thing or two to demolish your own chances at being remembered (or at least remembered fondly), but securing said reputation might as well be left up to the directions of the wind.
When August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House in 1939, it was for the express purpose of preserving Lovecraft’s works, by way of giving them fancy hardcover editions. Lovecraft had died in 1937, in poverty and as an obscure figure in the grand scheme of American letters, and there was a pretty good chance he would’ve retained that obscurity (at least for a while) if not for Derleth and Wandrei’s efforts. Arkham House soon expanded its scope and brought other authors from the Lovecraft circle into book form, giving them similarly needed facelifts. Now Lovecraft is recognized as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, even getting a Library of America hardcover volume collecting his most essential work, and “Lovecraftian” horror is synonymous with cosmic horror. Yet there are other authors, like Henry S. Whitehead and Frank Belknap Long, whom Derleth and Wandrei had rescued temporarily, only to still languish in obscurity decades later. Someone with resources might come along to dig up your work after you’ve died and give it the “proper” treatment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be canonized posthumously. There are too many factors going into one’s own assessment as a writer. I know this is a very “boomer” opinion to have, even though I’m only turning thirty this year, but it seems to me that people around my age who are earnest about SF are, in questioning the supposed masters of yore, too quick to throw the baby out with the bath water. As a fan myself there’s not much I can do about this, but at least I’m trying here.
(The Shining. Cover by Dave Christensen. Doubleday, 1977.)
Aside from comedy, horror is the genre whose impact hinges most on its brevity, and indeed comedy and horror are rather closely linked, almost like twin siblings who have strikingly different personalities. Both traditionally rely on a setup followed by a punchline, preferably in quick succession. If you watch some third-rate horror movie you’ll likely be subjected to the “jump scare,” which itself plays out like a joke: there’s the setup (the growing sense of tension, either through a building musical score or the conspicuous lack of music, the person about to be jump-scared either knowing implicitly that something lurks around the corner or being totally ignorant of that lurking thing), followed by the punchline (the jump scare itself, typically accompanied by a scare chord from the music section). So, horror is tension plus time. The tension can only be sustained for so long, much like how the setup for a joke can only be sustained for so long before the audience gets impatient or bored, hence why historically horror has worked best and most often at short lengths. Surveying the history of horror literature in the Anglosphere as we recognize it, from the late 18th century to now, there’s no shortage of authors who wrote horror prolifically at short lengths. In the history of American literature especially the art of the modern short story can be traced back to Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving, who both often wrote either horror or fantasy of a weird if not outright horrific sort. Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “The Adventure of the German Student” by themselves may have inspired quite a few authors to try their hand at what we now call weird fiction, but then Irving wasn’t primarily a horror writer. Instead it was Poe who made his name as a master of horror in the short form, in the process also giving rise to the detective story, and even a fair amount of science fiction.
Poe’s most famous and arguably best story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” came as a revelation when it was published in 1839—not so much for its innovation but in how it reshaped what had been for a couple decades seen as a literary school that had run its course: the capital-G Gothic narrative. I say “narrative,” but the Gothic story was, prior to Poe, typically of novella or novel length, the latter being more lucrative. The reality is that what was true in 1820 is more or less still true in 2025, which is that novels sell. With a few very notable exceptions (I’m looking at you, Ted Chiang), the rule is that if you wanna “make it” as a writer then you have to write novels. You can write short fiction on the side if you want, as like a hobby, but you must write at least a few novels. Preferably a series, if you can. And yet, despite the demands of capital, horror at novel length only existed sporadically in the time before Poe, and indeed for more than a century after his death. The horror novelist, i.e., someone who specializes at least somewhat in writing horror novels, simply did not exist yet. Consider what H. P. Lovecraft, in his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” thought of as the first true supernatural horror novel, that being Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Lewis, the learned son of a diplomat, was only 19 when he wrote The Monk, a messy and rambling but also striking and entertainingly grotesque novel, published in 1795 or 1796 depending on the source. The Monk sparked controversy in the UK at the time, but it also sold well, to the point where it garnered the very young Lewis a reputation which he was not terribly keen on, being called “Monk” Lewis. While Lewis would continue writing, mostly for the stage, he never wrote a proper follow-up to The Monk; maybe he would have, had he not died young, at only 42.
There goes our first would-be horror novelist.
There was, of course, a close contemporary of Lewis’s who bordered on being a horror novelist, and may have been one had what she written been more in line with the genre. Ann Radcliffe is a name fans of Jane Austen would find as ringing a bell, if only because Austen satirizes her work rather playfully in the novel Northanger Abbey. Radcliffe was famous at the tail end of the 18th century for her Gothic novels, although actually she only wrote six of them before retiring from novel-writing at a relatively young age, and only one of them, The Mysteries of Udolpho, holds serious water in pop culture. Radcliffe’s novels are not horror as we understand the term, but more true to the title of that aforementioned novel, they’re meant to be taken as mysterious. The Gothic elements, from the castles to the Spanish Inquisition, certainly make these works rub shoulders with proper horror, but scaring her readers was not Radcliffe’s aim; rather she wanted to convey a sense of wonder and mystery, although many, including Lovecraft, fault her for providing at times convoluted rational explanations for what appear to be supernatural doings. In part due to Austen’s skewering of her work (albeit that it seemed to be affectionate) and partly from a rare case of pop culture osmosis having a negative effect on an artist’s reputation, Radcliffe’s work has only gotten reevaluated in the past couple decades, some 200+ years after publication. A couple decades after Radcliffe’s retirement, indeed around the time of Austen’s death, there were at least two one-off efforts from very different authors that would do what Radcliffe did not: Mary Shelley with Frankenstein and Charles Maturin with Melmoth the Wanderer. Lovecraft considered both but especially the latter to be the last and ultimately best out of the original Gothic tradition.
Mary Shelley needs no introduction, although it must be said that the stars seemed to align such that she would become one of the most important authors in all English literature, despite said importance hinging more or less on a single work. Shelley was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, who were both famous in their time as proto-feminist and anti-authoritarian figures. Shelley herself married the now-famous Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who sadly died very young in a shipwreck, just a few years after the publication of Frankenstein. The story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein is almost as famous as the novel itself, to the point where it’s recreated as the framing narrative in Bride of Frankenstein (weird choice, I know). The story goes that in 1816 Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, and John Polidori made a bet to see who could write the best horror story, although only Mary and Polidori actually managed to finish their contributions, the latter having written the pioneering vampire story “The Vampyre.” Frankenstein was published in 1818, with Mary Shelley revising it considerably in 1831; a good way to start an argument with fans of the book is to ask which version one should read first. Brian Aldiss later claimed, in Billion Year Spree among other places, that Frankenstein was the Big Bang moment for science fiction, the first proper SF story that set the standard for all to follow—a claim that certainly has firm ground for itself. But while Shelley wrote another major SF novel, The Last Man, Frankenstein remained her most substantial horror story, never mind the work she remains by far the most known for.
Charles Maturin was a very different case from Mary Shelley. An Irish Protestant clergyman of French heritage, Maturin mostly wrote in obscurity, and indeed Melmoth the Wanderer, widely considered his magnum opus, is the only thing of his you’ll likely to find in bookstores. Published in 1820, and inspired somewhat by what Maturin called “the Radcliffe romance,” Melmoth the Wanderer goes far beyond what Radcliffe or even Shelley had done, being at once a harrowing and genuinely eerie Gothic narrative and also bordering on an encyclopedic novel, being dense with allusions and references. One needs an edition that comes with notes when tackling this one. But while it is perhaps overstuffed with frame tales and almost cartoonish in its anti-Catholic sentiments (there’s a looooong sequence involving the Inquisition), there is, as Lovecraft says, “an understanding of the profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear.” Perhaps for the first time since The Monk, which is a religiously serious novel despite its grotesquery, there’s a tangible sense of fire-and-brimstone wrath in horror writing, made possible with Maturin’s novel. Maturin may have written a follow-up to Melmoth the Wanderer, had he not died only four years after its publication; as such it remains yet another one-off effort in the genre’s history, which at this point seems plagued by inconsistency. In the whole first half of the 19th century there was not a single writer, at least in the Anglosphere, who took up the mantle of writing horror consistently at novel length, and indeed there wouldn’t be one for a long while yet. Maturin’s own grand-nephew, the much more famous Oscar Wilde, himself wrote a rightly beloved horror novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; but alas it would be his only novel, and anyway Wilde was not exactly a horror writer.
Looking back on the genre’s history, one would think horror literature stayed more or less dormant through the Victorian era and into the early 20th century, but this is far from true, for at short length the genre stayed very much alive and well through the years. There was a half-century period, from about 1890 to 1940, where the horror short story was arguably at the height of both its average quality and how much was being written, between those who specialized in horror and those who did not. The list, even if we’re just counting “literary” authors who wrote a fair number of short horror stories, is daunting: Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, John Collier, O. Henry, and so on. But then you also had those who did specialize in horror, at which point the list becomes near-endless. Yet none of these people wrote horror novels with any regularity—except maybe one. The closest we have to the first proper horror novelist is the semi-obscure William Hope Hodgson, whose books did not sell much when he was alive and whose untimely death on the battlefields of World War I meant he did not live to interact with the authors he would influence. Hodgson wrote four novels, but I’m especially considering the first three, which were written and published in quick succession, and which Hodgson considered what “may be termed a trilogy; for, though very different in scope, each of the three books deals with certain conceptions that have an elemental kinship.” These are The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,”The House on the Borderland, and The Ghost Pirates. I’ve read all three, and indeed despite very different settings (The House on the Borderland especially feels like an outlier), they do seem in conversation with each other; they’re also early examples of weird horror crossed with a romanticism that has not aged nearly as well. The Ghost Pirates, being easily the least romantic of the three, I would say is also the best from start to finish. Hodgson was a true innovator, but he also wrote for a living and it shows, not to mention his early death robbed us of more work.
It could be because the genre’s finest contributors tended to either stick to short stories and novellas or die tragically young, or both, but even during the height of Weird Tales, in the latter half of the 1920s through the ’30s, horror novels were still hard to come by. The editor of Weird Tales during this period, Farnsworth Wright, wasn’t keen on long serials, and as such you would only get maybe one full novel serialized in that magazine per year, sometimes not even that. Even when a novel runs in Weird Tales it is unlikely to find publication in book form anytime soon; there just wasn’t a market for new horror books in the ’30s. It’s perhaps telling that Lovecraft’s own three longest stories, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, had long journeys to publication, with only At the Mountains of Madness seeing print in Lovecraft’s lifetime, and only some five years after he had written it. His contemporaries didn’t do any better for the most part. Seabury Quinn, who in the ’30s was one of Weird Tales‘s most popular contributors, had his novel The Devil’s Bride serialized in 1932, yet it would not appear in book form until 1976. Robert Bloch’s first novel, The Scarf, languished in obscurity for decades and only got brought back into print literally this year. Bloch of course gained mainstream recognition for Psycho, the Alfred Hitchcock movie more so than the book itself; but while it is horror, Psycho is totally bereft of supernatural elements, making it an outlier in Bloch’s oeuvre. Frank Belknap Long wrote almost no horror at novel length. Robert E. Howard only managed to complete one novel, The Hour of the Dragon, which is a Conan story and not horror. When Wright stepped down as editor, shortly before his death, Weird Tales gave even less room to serials, with its new editor, Dorothy McIlwraith, focusing more strictly on short stories.
By the time the US entered World War II, the magazine market for both horror and fantasy was at a bit of a crossroads, and there was still no substantial book market for either; this trend continued into the post-war years, albeit there were a few spots of hope. In the ’50s Richard Matheson blessed us with semi-regular excursions into horror at novel length, including I Am Legend, A Stir of Echoes, and The Shrinking Man (primarily SF but definitely containing prominent horror elements), never mind his almost obligatory haunted-house novel Hell House in 1971. As with Bloch, however, Matheson wrote more prolifically elsewhere, be it short stories or writing film and TV scripts. Shirley Jackson, one of the most famous and controversial short story writers of her time, also found reasonable success with novels, and probably would have enjoyed the deluge of horror in the ’70s if not for her death in 1965. Indeed it wasn’t until the ’70s that the horror novel, having by this point become divorced from the magazine market while at the same time taking advantage of loosening censorship in multiple mediums, had begun truly to blossom in the sense that multiple authors were making a killing on the profession at the same time. Alongside Hell House in 1971 we also got William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, which you may have heard of. The Exorcist was not only a bestseller but spawned an even more popular movie that took home two Oscars, including one for Blatty’s screenplay. Horror, especially in the film world, was becoming nigh-ubiquitous, but for literature it would take one more push to make a powerhouse industry out of it.
In 1974, a sort of miracle happened. A young and often drunk writer from Maine in his twenties, named Stephen King, finally got his novel Carrie published, at Doubleday and under the shrewd editorship of one Bill Thompson. King had been writing horror stories since the tail end of the ’60s, and even got some published in respectable mainstream outlets prior to Carrie; but it was that first novel, which mind you is really a mix of horror and science fiction, which made him a star. However, it would’ve been one thing if King had written just Carrie before going back to short fiction; instead he did what previously mentioned authors did or could not do and came back soon with yet another bestseller in the form of ‘Salem’s Lot. Being one of the all-time classic vampire novels and arguably King’s first truly great novel, ‘Salem’s Lot was far more ambitious than Carrie, yet also showed a growing maturity in King’s writing and a fine-tuning when it came to building tension. By the time The Shining was published, not quite two years after ‘Salem’s Lot, it became apparent that King was a force to be reckoned with, for both his productivity and his commitment to writing horror that was accessible to the mainstream reader. I’ve given King a lot of shit, as I continue to do (I recently tried reading his overview of 20th century horror, Danse Macabre, and couldn’t get through it because I thought it was quite bad), but it would also be foolish to not give credit where credit’s due. It could be that King was on a creative streak in the ’70s, when he was young and hungry, or it could be that Thompson had edited his first four novels and provided a restraint latter-day King lacked, or it could be some combination; but regardless, King had emerged as almost an industry unto himself, a fact which shook the reading world.
By the end of the ’70s the horror novelist, as distinct from a novelist who sometimes writes horror, had come into existence, seemingly arbitrarily. Anne Rice made her novel debut with Interview with the Vampire in 1976, a very gay horror novel that also became a bestseller and which spawned a film adaptation, a TV adaptation, and a long-running book series. Peter Straub, who had made his debut in 1973 with the non-horror novel Marriages, languished in obscurity for a bit before making it big with Ghost Story in 1979, an atmospheric if also bloated horror novel about shape-shifting monsters. You may have heard of Straub if you’re a King fan because of their acclaimed collaborative novel The Talisman. (They also much later wrote a sequel, Black House, although we don’t talk about that one as much.) The ’80s saw such a growth in horror novels being published every year that the Horror Writers Association (HWA) was founded in 1985, and in 1987 would start giving out the Bram Stoker Award for several categories, it being the horror equivalent of the Hugo. The first year’s shortlist for Best Novel was so packed the the winner ended up being a tie between King’s Misery and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song. Indeed at this point you had Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Dean Koontz, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Tim Powers, and others who made a living off of writing novels which at least had prominent horror elements. The dam had burst open. These were not coming from small publishers either, like Arham House, but big names like Doubleday, Viking Press, and Pocket Books. When it comes to horror the big and small publishers have come to work parallel with each other, each covering ground the other will not, with the latter especially being good for short fiction and “the classics.” Regardless, it seems that nobody has dared look back.
It took close to two centuries, and indeed a few decades longer than it took with science fiction and fantasy, but long-form horror literature became its own industry, beholden to both critics and capital, for better or for worse. When David G. Hartwell assembled the landmark reprint anthology The Dark Descent in 1987, he envisioned it as a look back on the history of horror at it pertained to short fiction, since it had become apparent by the mid-’80s that the horror novel had overtaken the horror short story in the popular consciousness. The problem is that while the horror novel was and continues to be popular, there was no continuity of long-form horror up to that point, since as we can see, looking over this pretty lengthy piece of mine, the horror novel in English, for nearly 200 years, only existed sporadically. As Hartwell says in his introduction:
It is evident both from the recent novels themselves and from the public statements of many of the writers that Stephen King, Peter Straub and Ramsey Campbell, and a number of other leading novelists, have been discussing among themselves—and trying to solve in their works—the perceived problems of developing the horror novel into a sophisticated and effective form.
With the exceptions of a few novels which are unspeakably old at this point (Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stoker’s Dracula, and a couple others), the novels making up the horror “canon” have come about no earlier than 1950; and indeed recency bias has come into effect with horror far more profoundly than with science fiction, if only because there are so few horror novels published between 1900 and 1970 that one could even name, let alone think of as “canonical.” The horror novelist is a relatively new animal, being a mutation, somewhere between the Gothic novelist and the SF novelist. When King dies (hopefully later rather than sooner), we’ll have to reckon with his legacy with regards to his own body of work, but also the industry he helped create. It’s possible that in one year or in ten there will be a conspicuous King-shaped hole in horror writing, after Anne Rice and Peter Straub’s recent deaths. And Ramsey Campbell is looking quite old now, as is Dan Simmons, although Simmons is an asshole anyway. Hartwell himself died in 2016, and I’m not sure if he ever found a solution to the problem that is the still-young and uncertain world of horror novels as “serious” literature, which we are to study alongside examples of “canonical” SF and fantasy. It’s not a problem for me to think about much longer, since I tend to prefer short stories and novellas, but it’s food for thought.
Here it is, another Observatory post that’s a couple days late, along with a short story review that’s nowhere to be found. This case is especially painful for me because I respect C. L. Moore a lot, and I irked myself when I read her Jirel of Joiry story “Jirel Meets Magic” and found that I had not read it deeply enough to write a review that’d be worth a damn about it. Unlike the last time this happened, however, it really was because I felt unprepared to deal with Moore’s level of writing, since it must be said she was a better prose stylist than most of her contemporaries, especially in the ’30s. Since I don’t feel qualified to review more Jirel stories, at least for the foreseeable future, I do hope instead to cover a Kuttner-Moore story in February, as a way to return to both of those authors whom I like a great deal. For now, let’s talk about something else. This is a sequel to the Observatory post I wrote last month, “The Origins of Depression in Science Fiction,” which is actually one of my favorite editorials I’ve written thus far, even if it was not what you’d call a “pleasure” to write—rather it was a post I felt I had to write. Turns out that despite the aforementioned post being over 2,000 words long, I still have much more to say on the topic. When I wrote that earlier editorial I did it as a way to talk about my own struggles as a manic-depressive, but I also made an argument which boiled down to this: that the massive uptick in discussing mental illness through genre SF corresponded with, or perhaps was sparked by, the end of World War II, more specifically the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What had previously been only treated as theoretical suddenly became a harsh reality for SF writers, which caused a sea change for the field.
The strange thing about all this, if you think about it, is that while the Allies won World War II, vanquishing a few fascist regimes in the process, such a sense of victory did not show itself in SF writing in the months and years following the war’s end. Why weren’t these people happy? They won! Not only did they succeed in defeating the Nazis, but long-held speculations about the possibility (even the inevitability) of nuclear weapons had been vindicated overnight. It was the closest, at least up to that point, that science fiction had come to actually predicting the future and getting it right. Perhaps the person mostly keenly aware of this change in the moment was John W. Campbell, who famously got into some hot water with some federal agents because of a story he had published in the March 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction: Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline.” Now, having read “Deadline” for myself, I can say it’s frankly not a very good story; but then it didn’t need to be. Cartmill, who at the time was a new writer, had, much with Campbell’s assistance, written a story that serves as a rather unsubtle allegory about the use of nuclear weapons against the Axis powers. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure that the US government was working on the atomic bomb, or at least some weapon of mass destruction, and that both the Axis powers and even America’s own allies (namely the Soviet Union) were keen on finding out what these scientists were cooking. The March 1944 issue of Astounding would’ve been on newsstands in February, a whole 18 months before the US dropped an actual atomic bomb on actual human beings. Compared to Street & Smith’s other magazines, Astounding did not have a big readership, but it would be their only genre magazine to survive the wartime paper rationing and I suspect Astounding‘s power for prophecy was a big reason why it was spared.
Despite the newfound vindication, however, it seems that a savage gale had swept across the ocean of science fiction with the war’s end, and Astounding, which up to 1945 tended to published some of the most optimistic fiction in the field, took on a darker hue. This change in mood was by no means unique to Campbell’s magazine, of course: every American SF magazine at the time, be it Starling Stories or its more juvenile sister magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories, got at least a bit darker in editors’ speculations and what fiction they were willing to print. During the war years, specifically 1942 to 1945, it was not uncommon to find what you might call a propaganda story in an issue of Astounding, about a character or group of characters going up against either an obvious analog (aha) for the Nazis or just the Nazis outright; and naturally these stories are about how we will or at least should beat Hitler and his goons. Off the top of my head I’m thinking of A. E. van Vogt’s “Secret Unattainable” and J. Francis McComas’s “Flight into Darkness.” Yet following the war’s end there came, over the next handful of years, a bunch of stories in Astounding and elsewhere that could not have been reasonably published (or indeed thought of) during the war, partly because of how bleak these new stories are, including but not limited to C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons,” T. L. Sherred’s “E for Effort,” A. E. van Vogt’s “Dormant,” Theodore Sturgeon’s “Memorial” and “There Is No Defense,” Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands…,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “History Lesson,” too many Ray Bradbury stories from this period to count, and about half of the stories that would comprise Clifford D. Simak’s City. Perhaps the most downbeat of all these post-war stories, in fact one of the darkest stories in the genre’s whole history (which is saying a lot), is Edmond Hamilton’s “What’s It Like Out There?,” which appeared in the December 1952 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The kicker here is that Hamilton had written an early draft of this story a whole two decades earlier, but could not get it published then; but it found a home, seven years after World War II and in the midst of the Korean War.
(Funny aside about Sturgeon’s “There Is No Defense,” published in the issue of Astounding pictured above: Campbell, in the previous issue’s Of Times to Come section, had to tell readers that the upcoming Sturgeon story “is not about atomic bomb warfare,” despite what the title would naturally make people think. However, the Alejandro cover, which does not illustrate a particular story and which Campbell calls “purely symbolic,” showing an Olympian figure splitting the atom with what seems to be a pair of lightning bolts, tells me that “atomic bomb warfare” must’ve been on somebody’s mind. Given the timing, it’s not hard to see why.)
One could argue the latter half of the ’40s to the early ’50s marked a crucial turning point in the development of genre SF, as a kind of uniquely American form of fiction writing. Oh, there was of course SF written outside the US, before and after World War II; after all, arguably the biggest point of inspiration for Amazing Stories, when it launched in 1926, was H. G. Wells. There was another profoundly influential work of SF from the UK that arrived just in time to coincide with the collective turn toward depression and pessimism that American SF was seeing: George Orwell’s 1984. Rather than celebrate the defeat of Nazism, 1984 warns what was then the western side of the so-called Iron Curtain about totalitarianism—both of the Soviet variety and a more capitalistic American and British fascism. Orwell, in the wake of the war’s end and the start of the Cold War, saw not a new dawn for democracy in the “civilized” world but, to paraphrase him, a man (as in humanity) getting his faced stomped on by an authoritarian’s boot, forever. You know who seemed to agree with Orwell’s post-war pessimism? C. M. Kornbluth, and William Tenn, and Robert Sheckley, and Philip K. Dick, and Henry Kuttner, and so on. These are authors who either only debuted after the war’s end or had gotten lucky during the war years. (Kornbluth is a funny example in that he is both technically a pre-war writer and someone who, after taking a break from writing for several years, returned to a market that had changed drastically so as to better suit his perpetual bitterness.) We still got stories of daring invention and adventure, of man’s destiny as the owner of the universe, but we also got a good helping of stories that Campbell would not have approved. By the early ’50s the market had broadened such that even something as nihilistic as Tenn’s “The Liberation of Earth” got published in a pulpy magazine.
I’ve made it no secret that I find genre SF in the late ’40s through the ’50s very interesting, and not for the reasons people tend to idolize that period of American history. Sure, there was economic prosperity—for some people. The US quickly rose to the occasion as the leader of the Western allies, by virtue of largely of having escaped World War II unscathed compared to the UK and France. But there was racial strife, a revived paranoia that there’s a filthy communist lurking under ever bed, not to mention a forced marriage between Christianity and capitalism. As the Cold War kicked into high gear it was no longer enough to just be a good Christian in America (God forbid you were not a Christian to begin with), you had to also be a good capitalist, the problem being that worship of Christ and worship of the dollar make for uneasy bedfellows. Philosophically the two are like oil and water. Sadly, for almost eighty years at this point we’ve had to live with the suffocating, murderous reality of worshipping the dollar, seeing the rise of neo-liberalism and Christofascism, watching them spread and tangle like weeds in one’s garden. What’s not to be depressed about? The future is looking bleak. As famous as they are, generally optimistic writers like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov are nowadays plagued by controversy, or even simply ambivalence from the modern SF reading crowd. It’s not uncommon to find an earnest SF reader under the age of forty nowadays who thinks Asimov is boring, or that Heinlein is too problematic; but these people would probably connect much more with someone like Kornbluth or Kuttner. Given that we’re constantly at risk of being torn down and obliterated by depression, since it seems clear to at least some of us that we’re living in the last days of industrial capitalism (or so we hope), we might not need a Heinlein or Asimov, but someone… darker.
(James Tiptree, Jr., real name Alice Bradley Sheldon [right] with her second husband, Huntington Sheldon [left]. Dated 1946.)
(Note: I shouldn’t have to say this, given the title of today’s post, but I’ll be discussing depression, mental illness generally, and suicide, including some real-life cases that have haunted our field.)
I was set to review Clare Winger Harris’s story “A Runaway World” today, but as you can see, this is not a review. I was also set to write my Observatory post for the 15th, but that didn’t happen either. Well, I’m doing it now. The truth is that when I read “A Runaway World” a couple days ago, two things occurred to me: that it wasn’t a very good story (in my opinion), and that I wasn’t sure what I would even write about it. This was a problem, because normally, even with stories that are sort of dull or not good, I’m able to articulate something such that I’m about to get at least a thousand-word review in; but this time I found myself pretty much totally divorced from the material I was supposed to be thinking and writing about. It then occurred to me that I was mentally unable to engage with the material. This is not to say that Harris was actually too “smart” a writer for me or that I had somehow missed the point of the thing, but that I was too much plagued with what a few centuries ago was called “the humors” to focus on what I was reading. I was too depressed. For the past four or five days, or almost a week at this point, I’ve slipped into a manic or depressive episode at least once during the day which left me basically unable to do anything except wish to crawl into a dark hole and cry in solitude, or to take my own life. I’m a manic-depressive. My therapist, whom I’ve been seeing for just under a year now, suspects I have bipolar disorder, specifically type II, which basically means that my mood shifts, for better or worse, tend to last a short time, a few hours instead of a few days like bipolar type I.
I was a fan of science fiction long before I was aware that there might be something “wrong” with me. One of the first books I ever read outside of the classroom was Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which in hindsight should have been a red flag. I read quite a bit of Vonnegut in high school: Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, and even Breakfast of Champions, that really weird one that barely counts as a novel (not to be confused with Timequake, which isn’t really a novel at all). Breakfast of Champions especially stuck out to me when I read it at the time, for its weirdness but also Vonnegut’s candidness about his own long-term battle with depression, his family’s history of depression (the fact that his mother had killed herself), his PTSD, his disgust with the glorification of war in American culture, and so on. Vonnegut would live to a ripe old age, despite his “best” efforts (he somewhat jokingly claimed to smoke unfiltered cigarettes over many years as a way of killing himself), although it wasn’t cancer or a heart attack that got him but a trip down the stairs. It’s almost comedic, in a way I’m sure he would’ve approved of. Vonnegut ultimately won against his war with depression, in the sense that he allowed circumstance to take him rather than his own hand—for the difference between victory and defeat for every depressive is the question of whether to kill yourself or to leave your fragile little existence in the hands of the gods. Indeed, according to Albert Camus, the question of whether to kill yourself may be the only important question. Camus himself was not suicidal, on the contrary having a real lust for life; and yet as William Styron points out in his short but telling memoir, Darkness Visible, Camus became a passenger with someone he knew to be a reckless driver, in the car accident that would kill him, “so there was an element of recklessness in the accident that bore overtones of the near-suicidal, at least of a death flirtation.” Styron wrote Darkness Visible as a way to cope with his clinical depression, but like Vonnegut he chose to reject suicide.
Some other writers, including several prominent ones in the history of science fiction and fantasy, did not reject suicide. Robert E. Howard, James Tiptree, Jr., Walter M. Miller, Jr., Thomas M. Disch, H. Beam Piper, and some others I could mention, gave into some kind of psychological malady that had been pushing them to the brink. Howard is probably the most famous example out of all of them, and he was only thirty when he died. Supposedly Howard hated the idea of aging such that he wished not to live to an old age, which for someone so young is not in itself an unusual line of thinking. One has to admit that there’s also also an increasing sense of melancholy and foreboding in terms of tone, with Howard’s writing as he got closer to the day he chose to put a gun to his head; but this, by itself, is also not enough of a sign to have caused worry in those who knew Howard at the time. Sure, “Beyond the Black River” is a much more melancholy entry in the Conan series than “The People of the Black Circle,” which was published a year prior, but conveying melancholy through fiction is by no means a sign that the author is suicidal. As you may know, especially if you’re a fan of pre-Tolkien fantasy, Howard had a history of being sort of a moody fellow, but what pushed him into a more extreme mindset was his mother’s long-term illness and her impending death. There have been attempts to analyze Howard’s relationship with his mother, some of them in poor taste, but I’ll just say that what we know for certain is that Howard struggled to imagine a life for himself without his mother in it. As his mother’s illness reached its bitter end, Howard, like a lot of suicides who go through with the act, gave little clues to those closest to him as to what he was planning. But nobody took the hint until it was too late.
Howard’s suicide would haunt the pages of Weird Tales, his most frequent outlet, for years, not least because reprints and unpublished work from Howard would appear in that magazine after his death; and indeed hitherto unpublished work by Howard would appear sporadically over the next few decades, as if unearthed or discovered in some dusty tomb, giving one the sense that despite having been dead for almost ninety years now, we still feel the ripples of this man’s decision to cut his life and career short. Of course, while Howard suffered from insecurities, having to do with masculinity and other things, he was not (at least as far as I can tell) a long-term depressive; rather his suicide came about from a mix of material circumstances and something gone amiss in his own mind. Mind you that when I discuss depression here I am not exactly referring to depression in a clinical sense, like how a therapist or psychiatrist would use the term; rather I am using the word as laymen would have understood it for centuries for now, or for as long as the idea of depression has been understood in recorded history. By this I mean that depression at its core is the sense that the outside world, the material world, seems to shrink and become insignificant as one’s own sense of self-worth declines—a kind of self-loathing narcissism, or a snake eating its own tail. People who are unsympathetic to depressives (i.e., people who to some degree lack empathy for others) will say something along the lines of: “People with depression are so self-centered.” In a way this statement is true, although probably not in the way the empathy-deficient person imagines. The problem with depression is that due to the nature of the illness, there is be a barrier between the depressive and the people around them, who presumably are not also depressives. The result is that the depressive feels that they have no choice but to gaze inward, and to see an abyss; it’s self-obsession, but also self-hatred.
(Robert E. Howard in 1934, two years before his death.)
The other problem with depression, particularly those like myself who are depressives and also fans of SF, is that depictions of depression in SF seem to be nonexistent prior to maybe the 1950s. You can find a few examples, very scant and spread apart, but the exceptions if anything prove the rule. This is especially true of genre SF, in the American tradition, which does bring me back to the story I was supposed to review today. To make a long story short, “A Runaway World” is about Earth and Mars mysteriously being jettisoned from the solar system, in a scheme that has to do with radio waves and making alien contact. Or something like that. It’s an early example of a natural (or in this case, rather unnatural) catastrophe narrative that also runs adjacent to the Big Dumb Object™ narrative. It’s confusingly written and Harris’s prose is pulpy, to say the least, such that other than the fact that it’s apparently the first story by a female writer published under her own name in a genre magazine, there’s really nothing special about it. “A Runaway World” does serve, however, as a perfectly fine example of the kind of SF that normally saw print in the ’20s and ’30s, when genre SF saw print in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories; and, if we’re being perfectly honest, this technology-driven (i.e., material-driven) breed of SF would continue during the “golden age” of Astounding Science Fiction under John W. Campbell’s editorship. These stories are not really concerned with spirituality or even psychology, but are instead about people doing things, so in this way they are strictly materialist. There’s a material problem that requires a material solution. Now is not the time to ponder one’s own neurosis, or even the feelings of others. Something is to be done, physically. Characters in these old pulp stories can now strike us as weirdly inhuman, and while flat characterization is the surface criticism one should make, the lack of psychological depth is intrinsically tied with that characterization. These characters feel like cardboard because there’s nothing inside. As Gertrude Stein said, “There is no there there.”
Surely at least some of the authors who contributed to the early years of genre SF felt depression, anxiety, PTSD, and so on; but if they did in their personal lives then they dared not express such troubles in their fiction. Characters in the early stories of E. E. Smith, Murray Leinster, Raymond Z. Gallun, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein are (at least as far as the authors seem to think) perfectly reasonable and mentally fine-tuned fellows. Hal Clement, who made his debut during the height of Campbell’s powers, might be most “guilty” of this, as his characters, while being ostensibly human, do not have any human (in the psychological, Shakespearean sense) concerns to speak of. Mental illness and even just moments of mental disorder (say a nervous breakdown or an anxiety attack) were simply not things one was to write about if one wrote for the magazines in those days. Between the years of 1926 (when Amazing Stories launched and, incidentally, when “A Runaway World” was published) and circa 1945, one simply did not write or talk about mental illness anywhere near science fiction; and if you felt tempted then it was something between you and your therapist. Or God. Whichever you preferred. Yet in 1926 there were people, in the “literary” world, who wrote about their own mental illness, if only when projected onto their characters. The first examples to come to my mind are Virginia Woolf (suicide by drowning) and Ernest Hemingway (suicide by gunshot), who were both haunted by an inner sickness, among other things. But there was no one even close to a Woolf or Hemingway in the early days of genre SF—not just in writing skill but also giving a language to the array of mental pains that afflict far too many of us in the real world. I did, however, mention before that this streak of psychological emptiness in SF lasted from about 1926 to 1945, and there’s a reason for that.
World War II happened, and with it came a number of profound changes in the field. The once-hypothetical scenario of nuclear weapons became very much a reality overnight. Entire cities on fire. The enemy of the week went from being fascism to Soviet communism. There was the vast moral quandry of the Holocaust. There were also quite a few men who served in the war who came home, and decided to start writing science fiction. Kurt Vonnegut was one such veteran, whose experiences as a POW and subsequent PTSD inspired Slaughterhouse-Five. There was Walter M. Miller, who served as a bombardier, and who also suffered from PTSD and depression. There was C. M. Kornbluth, who saw action near the end of the war and whose already-weak heart was further weakened by the strain. Those who saw the horrors of World War II firsthand, and indeed those who grew up in the war’s aftermath (Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, etc.), seemed to take a much dimmer view of the human condition than the first generation of genre SF writers. Hal Clement served in the way and didn’t seem particularly bothered by his wartime experiences, but I see that as the exception that proves the rule. I have a bit of a hypothesis, although obviously you’re free to disagree with it: that one of the ways World War II impacted SF is how it made those us in the field aware that some of us, individually, are damaged inside. Before and during World War II the sentiment of the average SF story was, “There’s something wrong with the world,” but after the war it got amended to say, “There’s something wrong with the world, and me as well.” It’s hard to imagine a novel like A Canticle for Leibowitz, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or the stories of James Tiptree (possibly the most disturbed of all SF writers), could have been published in a landscape where depression were treated as if it did not exist.
(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.
(Cover by Atun Purser. Journey Planet, September 2024.)
Note #1: A few months ago I was asked to write an article for the lauded fanzine Journey Planet, which was putting together an issue centered around the theme of labor rights in genre fiction. Truth be told, I was scrambling for a juicy idea until I remembered that I had covered Richard Matheson’s 1956 boxing-of-the-future story “Steel” early this year, and I still had quite a bit to say about it. You can read the Journey Planet version of this editorial here, as well as articles and even a few short stories by writers who put in a lot more work than I did. I didn’t simply copy-paste my article here, as I did make some small changes, to expand on a couple things and to make the whole thing fit more with the conversational tone of this blog. I also removed the Commonwealth spelling that was forced upon me by a couple of dastardly Canadians. I’m an American, goddamnit!
Note #2: I shouldn’t have to say this, but I’ll be discussing spoilers for the short story “Steel,” and by extension the Twilight Zone adaptation starring Lee Marvin. The two are basically 1:1 in terms of plot. I will not, however, be discussing the 2011 film Real Steel, which is a much looser adaptation of Matheson’s story.
Many of Richard Matheson’s most famous stories involve alienation, and this is something that can be traced throughout pretty much his whole career. The unnamed child in his very first short story, “Born of Man and Woman,” is rendered unable to adapt to normal domestic life because of an odd mutation. The tortured protagonist of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (one of William Shatner’s finest roles) feels estranged from the people around him, including his own wife, after he has suffered a nervous breakdown. Scott Carey, the anti-hero (there’s very little “heroic” about him) of Matheson’s novel The Shrinking Man, finds his marriage eroding after a freak incident causes him to shrink to the size of an ant. The traveling salesman of Duel is already separated from the rest of humanity, stuck on a deserted and seemingly endless stretch of highway with only the radio for companionship, when a faceless trucker starts tormenting him. Similarly, “Steel” Kelly, a former boxer who had at one point made a name for himself, has been relegated to owning a robot built expressly for boxing in Matheson’s 1956 short story “Steel.” This is a very fine story, but more importantly it continues to feel prescient, not least because boxing has been all but replaced by MMA nowadays. It’s a story about the athlete-as-worker, the athlete-as-machine, and about a possible (even plausible) future in which the professional athlete has been reduced to a product.
“Steel” was first published in the May 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the same year as The Shrinking Man (it was a good year for Matheson), and it reads as an outlier in what is already a pretty diverse body of work—not thematically but rather in how it attempts to speculate on how human (read: American) culture might change in the future. Matheson’s science fiction is usually set in The Now™, with an average person being thrown into an SFnal situation through some accident or coincidence; so it shouldn’t be surprising that more often than not Matheson wrote horror or fantasy instead. As the man himself admitted in an interview, in the September 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine, “I never even knew what science fiction was until I sold my first story.” He was not what you would call an SF writer by inclination, which makes the genuinely speculative nature of “Steel” so different. (Even I Am Legend, published in 1954 and set in 1976, engages in very little speculation about society’s future, on account of the human populace having come down with a bad case of vampirism, and thus there’s no human culture left—at least of the non-vampire variety.) “Steel” is also unusual for Matheson in that it directly touches upon the question of labor—more specifically alienation from one’s own labor—as it may pertain to a future (but not too in the future) America. Kelly’s conflict is external (he needs money), but also internal (he needs to reconnect with the work from which he has been alienated).
The year is 1980 (I know, the futuristic year of 1980) and boxing between humans has been outlawed in the US for about a decade. “Steel” Kelly was a heavyweight and a reasonably respected boxer a decade ago (“Called me ‘Steel’ cause I never got knocked down once. Not once. I was even number nine in the ranks once.”), but since then he’s gotten older, has started losing his hair, and has taken to the road with Pole, his friend and the team’s mechanic, with their boxing robot, Battling Maxor. The initial problem is that Maxor is in dire need of repairs, requiring money the two men don’t have. Even if they were to repair the robot it’s still a B-2, set to go up against a B-7. Maybe five years ago Maxor would’ve done fine, but now he’s little more than a bucket of bolts; but if Kelly and Pole back out of the match now they don’t get any money. Their robot is badly outdated, and even ignoring that, it would barely be able to get in the ring. Kelly has been having a bad day, not helped by reminiscing openly about when he was in Maxor’s position, and it looks like he’s stuck in a corner. There is, of course, one possible alternative: get in the ring posing as Maxor. The robot has not been in a public match in three years, and apparently this is a future where people don’t record sports matches, so it’s a safe bet that nobody in the audience knows what Maxor looks like.
Kelly is a classic Matheson protagonist, in that he feels cut off from his fellow man and has a bit of a temper; even his friendship with Pole seems to be strained by the bad luck the two have been having, on top of Kelly clearly feeling demeaned by being the “manager” of his own replacement. A question we must ask ourselves is this: If an athlete is a worker, then can the athlete be replaced? I do wonder how many of us think of professional athletes as workers, despite the pay being real and the bodily risk certainly being no less real. I wonder how many people think, subconsciously, of athletes as products—or machinery. The real problem is that regardless of whether the athlete is more akin to a human worker or a machine, we still have to wonder if such a worker/machine can or even should be replaced. God knows an increasingly large portion of the labor market has been replaced by automation. Carpenters and blacksmiths must have felt this inner turmoil, at their own livelihoods being rendered obsolete, decades ago, and yet they probably weren’t listened to. Most carpenters’ hands have been replaced by machinery, so why not an athlete’s entire body? In the heat of the moment, with hard cash on the line, the prospect of getting back in the ring—even if he were to go down in the first round—appeals to Kelly. He hungers to return to doing what he loved most, to the point that the prospect of a robot beating the shit out of him doesn’t faze him much. The robots, while not sentient, are lifelike enough that if he acts right, he can dupe the audience. “Even from ringside the flesh tones looked human. Mawling had a special patent on that.” And hell, when he inevitably starts sweating that can be explained by Maxor having an oil leakage. Happens with old models. (This part isn’t explained in the TZ adaptation, such that Kelly visibly sweating comes off as a bit of a plot hole.)
Indeed, the plot is only allowed to happen because Kelly takes advantage of the fact that the robots have only gotten more convincing with each iteration, to the satisfaction of the audience. We’re never told why human boxing was made illegal, but given how physically grueling this sport in particular can be it’s not hard to imagine what spurred legal action. When “Steel” was adapted for an episode of The Twilight Zone, the in-story year had been moved from 1980 to “circa 1974,” even though the episode would air in 1963. In the TZ episode, human boxing was outlawed in 1968, a mere five years after the episode would have aired—which sounds outlandish, but consider that in 1962 welterweight boxer Emile Griffith practically beat opponent Benny Paret to a pulp, the latter dying of his injuries several hours after the match. The possibility of boxing being outlawed must have seemed very much that in the moment—a possibility. Yet while there are valid safety concerns with regards to boxing, Matheson paints a depressing picture of what a future where boxers are forcibly removed from their profession might look like. Even the audience members, while having become accustomed to the robot replacements, clearly miss the days when it was man against man in the ring, back when the ring had a referee and when fighters were able to get back up when they were knocked down. “The new B-nine, it was claimed by the Mawling publicity staff, would be able to get up, which would make for livelier and longer bouts.” The robots seem to get closer to emulating the humans they’ve replaced accurately, but Matheson implies there will always be that human touch missing from the equation. Kelly and his kind can’t be replaced completely.
Of course, Kelly goes down in the first round; and because he’s posing as a B-2 he can’t get back up. Not that he could have reasonably expected to beat a robot—simply speaking as a human, never mind that he’s no longer a spring chicken. Despite losing the match, getting a rib or two broken, plus getting only a fraction of the pay they were supposed to earn (you get paid just for getting in the ring, but going down in the first round nabs you the lowest payout), Kelly feels vindicated in a way that is perhaps hard for a man of his disposition to articulate—a kind of spiritual victory. Something about the capacity of the human spirit to persevere. It could be that when Matheson wrote “Steel” he merely wanted to incorporate a popular sport (at the time) into a fable about a unique quality—a je ne sais quoi—in humans when compared to their would-be robot counterparts. The athlete is a worker, and the worker, in his heart, wants liberation; we can accept nothing less. We cannot accept this divorce, between ourselves and our labor. This may not have been intended, but I would say boxing was the perfect sport to use for such a story, as it’s a deeply individualistic and physically intimate sport. Kelly’s struggle would not have hit quite as hard if this was about baseball or American football. There’s a degree of ambiguity to this story’s ending, as to what will become of Kelly and Pole after this, or what they could possibly do next; but that would be missing the point, I think. Kelly lost the fight, but he’s gone to prove he’s not quite out of a job yet. 1980 is behind us, if only physically, but “Steel” is one of those rare SF narratives that seems determined to project its concerns perpetually into the creeping and possibly condemned future—our future.
So the Hugos just happened. If you have the time and money you can see these things in-person for yourself, like the relatively lucky few who got to fly out to Glasgow this year. There are other awards given at Worldcon that are not Hugos despite being given at the same ceremony, namely the Astounding Award and the Lodestar. I’ve done a piece or two on the Hugos before, and while this is by no means an awards-oriented blog, the Hugos are inherently interesting if you’re into fandom because they give an impression as to what fellow genre enthuiasts are digging at the moment. The Hugo winners and nominees of each year serve as time capsules of a sort, since tastes change over time and there are circumstances behind each Worldcon that might influence who gets the phallic trophy and who misses the final ballot by a single vote. Speaking of which, I had a supporting membership for this year’s Worldcon, so I got to vote! One of the movies for the Best Dramatic Pressentation (Long Form) Hugo I nominated was Godzilla Minus One, one of my favorite movies from last year, and which made history by winning the Oscar for Best Visual Effects earlier this year. The film opened theatrically in the US back in December, and while it was originally supposed to have a very limited theatrical run here, reception was so strong that it ended up getting decent coverage. Yet, at least for the Hugos, this turned out to not be enough, as it missed the final ballot by one vote.
Not that I expected Godzilla Minus One to win, but the fact that it missed the final ballot in favor of *checks notes* Nimona? and The Wandering Earth II? I thought Nimona was… fine. I watched The Wandering Earth and thought it was terrible, and got about ten minutes into its sequel before realizing I wouldn’t survive it. Was not a fan of Barbie, which I know is a hot take. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is objectively a masterpiece of animation, but the bad PR surrounding it following its release meant it was an unlikely choice (I do suspect said bad PR contributed to it not winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, on top of one of the directors not being nominated due to some asinine rule about how many people on a film can be nominated in that category). I loved Poor Things, but while it was an awards darling it’s a little too niche—and not niche in such a way that would cater to Hugo voters. Then there’s the winner, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which I liked a good deal more than I expected to! I think I put it second or third on my slate, but I would say of the nominated films this might’ve been the most respectable choice. (I also put Oppenheimer on my slate, although I always knew that was a long shot since it’s not a genre movie but rather a movie partly about the sciences.) I expected Barbie to win and to have myself promptly groan at its winning, but then I remembered there’s a vocal minority of people who think it severely overrated. Barbie winning as many Oscars as Godzilla Minus One (the former underperformed while the latter was an underdog) should’ve been a winning sign. Again, missed the final ballot by a single vote!
Something about the Hugos and Worldcon generally is that this is supposed to be an international affair, which is why Worldcon is held in different countries (although next year’s Worldcon and the one after that are both gonna happen in the US, so…), with just last year’s Worldcon happening in China. The problem is that while there have been concerted efforts to avoid this, Worldcon is still very Anglocentric—only now it seems to be split between the Anglosphere and China. The Wandering Earth II certainly only made the final ballot becaue of Chinese backing (the quality of the film really doesn’t indicate it as awards-worthy), which is a shame because unless I’m forgetting something it would be only the fourth or fifth non-English movie to get nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation since the Long Form subcategory was introduced in 2003. The way it works is that Short Form is basically reserved for episodes of TV (on paper it’s for media under an hour long) while Long Form is for feature films and whole seasons of TV (with like one or two exceptions if you go digging around). Now, I see a big problem with movies competing with TV seasons, since we’re having to compares, say, a two-hour movie with eight hours of TV, but that’s not really what I’m here to talk about today. Thing is, like I said, out of the dozens of movies nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), only a handful were made outside the Anglosphere, and only one managed to win, which was Pan’s Labyrinth back in 2007. Pan’s Labyrinth was such a titan of a movie, a critical darling that got mainstream recognition at the time, to the point where it was kind of a breakthrough moment for Mexican cinema on the international stage. It was that extremely rare non-English movie to have sway with English-speaking veiwers; in other words, it’s the exception that proves the rule.
Godzilla Minus One got quite a bit of mainstream attention in the Anglosphere, although not enough to tip the scales such that it was able to get nominated, while The Wandering Earth II got in through a concerted effort from a section of fandom. Fandom politics! Don’t you love it? Of course the question becomes, “Why should a movie have to get enough exposure in the Anglosphere to get attention at the Hugos? Isn’t this whole thing supposed to ignore national barriers?” Sure, but statistically we know that to not be the case. The past decade has also seen a kind of snowball effect with Chinese SF fandom such that the Chinese portion has almost as much sway now as voters from the US. You could say this is better than nothing, but it also threatens to form a divide rather than collaboration between people from opposite ends of the world. The numerous issues around the Chengdu Worldcon don’t help, but I don’t even feel like getting into that; if I went into what went wrong we would be here all day. The point is that while the people in charge have been trying to make Worldcon more inclusive and international with each year (a good thing), some wrinkles still need to be ironed out, and there are some limitations I fear we don’t have a solution to, namely the fact that if a movie isn’t in English and isn’t readily available in North America before the voting deadlines, you’re shit out of luck. If we were to list genre movies from abroad that should’ve been shoe-ins for at least a nomination, but didn’t make it because not enough people in the Anglosphere would’ve even known about them at the time, the list would be almost infinite. Instead we have something like Wonder Woman (2017), which wasn’t even worthy of a nomination, let alone winning. Does anyone know if The Old Guard is any good?
Yet even if we were to knock down country and language barriers, there’s still the question of capitalism. If you didn’t catch Godzilla Minus One during its ssomewhat brief theatrical run in the US you then had to wait for VOD or streaming. A big reason I suspect Nimona made the final ballot was because, yes, enough people liked it, but it’s also a Netflix original. Availability was never an issue. In fairness, Godzilla Minus One is more readily available than most international films, and while we’re on the topic of Netflix, you can watch it as well as the Minus Color version there, the standard version having been added to Netflix in June—a few months after the nominating period for this year’s Hugos had ended. This is bullshit! I even wrote a quasi-review for this movie back in December, as a way to promote it to fellow fans since it was still in theaters at the time. Clearly this was not enough. This movie became enough of a dark horse in the months between its theatrical run and the Oscars to take home an award, but Hugo voters did not quite get behind it enough. Do we have ourselves to blame for this? Have we gotten to the point where even if a movie gets a decent theatrical run it’s still kneecapped if it doesn’t have enough of a theatrical run or if it doesn’t land on streaming soon enough? Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves released way back in March 2023, and while its box office numbers were ehhh, it did get good reviews and audience word-of-mouth was promising; perhaps more importantly it landed on streaming by the end of May, and even now it’s pretty easy to find. Honor Among Thieves had a whole year to amass a cult following, such that it was able to make the final ballot and finally to win the Hugo, and it’s a worthy winner!
You could say I’m peeved that arguably the best entry in a long-running film series since the first installment was denied an honor, and you’d be right. Godzilla Minus One came to those of us lucky enough to see as something of a revelation, masterfully towing the line between moral allegory, historical melodrama, and yes, a giant monster spectacle. Even as a long-time Godzilla fan I was stunned by what this movie managed to accomplish, and lemme tell you I was fucking stoked when it took home that Oscar. A somewhat niche but passionate sect of genre fandom felt vindicated that night. Incidentally Godzilla Minus One is the only non-English film to win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, in the 80+ years this category has existed. Again, I’m sure it wouldn’t have won, but it would’ve been nice if it had joined the very small group of non-English films to be recognized at the Hugos with a nomination. As Worldcon becomes more worldly (aha) we may see fewer egregious snubs like this in the future—so I hope.
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot to say about Tom Purdom. “Reduction in Arms” is actually my first Purdom story, despite the fact that I’ve been meaning to get around to reading at least a couple of his short stories before this. In this unique case, I decided to consult a certain colleague, Gideon Marcus over at Galactic Journey (which I’m now writing for), since he had known Purdom personally for some years, and he came back with an obituary segment he wrote for the SFWA.
This is not the whole piece, but you get the idea:
Tom was a titan. His career spanned eight decades, putting him among the Top 5 active SF authors in terms of longevity. Moreover, he was ahead of his time, featuring persons of color, positively portrayed queer couples, and polyamory in his SF works… in the early sixties. But most of all, Tom was a mensch of the first order, doing good without tooting his horn. And he was a good friend.
I couldn’t have said it better.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted only once in English, in the anthology International Relations Through Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander). Purdom apparently turned “Reduction in Arms” into a novel in 1971, but that’s only been printed the one time. From what I can tell he had envisioned the short story first and then decided to expand on it.
Enhancing Image
It’s the near future, and the Cold War has simmered down a bit in the wake of the Treaty of Beijing Peking, in which the US and USSR have agreed to keep tabs on each other for the sake of preventing nuclear annihilation. Of course, weapons of mass destruction don’t necessarily have to be nuclear, as the unnamed (to my recollection) narrator tells us that the US government has been tipped off to a possible secret lab in a Russian mental hospital. Lesechko, a scientist and a patient at said mental hospital, is rumored to be experimenting with a “ninety-five plus” virus—a bio-weapon with such a rapid spread that it would kill off 95% of a country’s population before a vaccine could be produced. The few who happen to be immune to such a virus would inherit a land of ruins, and needless to say the Cold War would turn very hot very fast. The narrator works a desk job and as such is in no immediate danger, but his colleagues, namely Weinberg and Prieto, are sent to inspect the mental hostpial.
The aim is to see, by way of inspection and interrogation, if the rumors are true, and if so to stop the experiments. The problem is that the team’s second aim is to preserve the Treaty of Peking, since it’s paramount for arms reduction and there are people on both sides who want the treaty thrown in the garbage—to make the Cold War heat up again. As you can guess, this almost has more in common with John le Carré spy novels than with genre SF conventions, although it does remind me of Algis Budrys’s Who?, which also had an explicit Cold War theme and dealt with the thorny nature of US and USSR relations. Like in Who?, there’s a dilemma at work. The narrator puts the core issue succinctly enough:
We assumed the Russians would deny us access, and we would have to negotiate with them. Before the negotiations began, we had to let them know we would withdraw from the treaty if they destroyed the lab while we were negotiating and tricked us into inspecting real patients. If they wanted to keep the treaty, they could either prove no lab had ever been hidden in the hospital—let their technical staff and ours figure out how—or they could show us the lab and give us all the information Lesechko had obtained.
The setup is very good. There are a couple things holding this story back from being more engaging, though. Let’s talk narrators. We have a first-person passive narrator here, in the sense that he doesn’t really do anything and is only reporting the events of the story after the fact. Now, a first-person passive narrator could work, depending on what type of story you’re telling. One of my favorite narrators in all of literature is in William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, and that guy spends most of the novel telling someone else’s story; but then the thing with Maxwell’s novel is that it’s about the tragedy of not treating someone with empathy at a time when they could really use a helping hand. A passive narrator can work in a story that’s light on action, but the problem is that “Reduction in Arms” is, at its core, an espionage thriller. Such a story requires a sense of urgency and a level of apparent danger that demands the reader’s involvement, and this is all deflated when the narrator is a) not in any danger, and b) writing about these events like he’s writing a not-terribly-interesting memoir. I was not on the edge of my scene when I should’ve been.
Another problem is length, although it’s not the problem I usually have with story length. Purdom had apparently written “Reduction in Arms” as a novelette, then shortened it and submitted, got rejected, then expanded it back to novelette-length. Given the weight of the subject matter, I actually think this story is too short, which you could say is the best negative criticism you can give of something. At 23 magazine pages I think it could’ve easily been double that length and made into a novella. We are introduced to a few interesting characters, Prieto especially with his background in the Cuban Revolution, but there’s little dialogue and we’re not given much time with these characters before everything goes to hell. I can see why Purdom would return to this material and make a novel out of it, because it’s rich as a what-if scenario and a pseudo-historical document. There were a lot of SF stories written during the Cold War that were about the Cold War, especially during its hotter moments (the Bay of Pigs “fiasco” is referenced here), but Purdom’s story feels more plausible than most. Just as importantly, this is not a story that mindlessly demonizes the Soviets.
There Be Spoilers Here
The lab turns out to be real, which would be bad enough, but Prieto also goes rogue and starts on a rampage against security and lab assistants. In a way this is convenient, despite the lives lost, because if the secret lab had just been discovered then the US would have reason enough to back out of the treaty; but with Prieto going against orders and threatening to take off with lab documents, the Soviets have very good reason to cooperate with US agents. The only solution that would satisfy both parties is for Weinberg to get the documents out of Prieto’s hands—by any means necessary. Weinberg is a trained agent, but he’d never actually had to kill anyone before; now he had to kill one of his own countrymen. It’s objectively the right thing to do, but Weinberg has to work himself up to it, and it doesn’t help that Prieto is very skilled gunman. “Whenever people talk about the good of humanity, Tolstoy had said, they are always getting ready to commit a crime.” The resulting shootout ends in Prieto dying and Weinberg narrowly surviving, more importantly with the documents intact. It’s a thrilling climax that could’ve been made better by a change in perspective and more development of the characters who are in the thick of it.
The very end implies that this skirmish over the bio-weapon lab will not be the last such incident, although I couldn’t help but be distracted by the story seemingly ending mid-sentence. I think the ellipses are supposed to be foreboding, but I was more thinking that the story had been cut off before it reached a proper conclusion.
A Step Farther Out
I wanna recommend “Reduction in Arms” more than I do. It’s a great idea for a story that ultimately still feels like a rough draft. In 1967 it might’ve been more impressive, hence it making the cover of the F&SF issue it appeared in. It could also be that I had recently read le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, because I simultaneously felt like I knew where Purdom was coming from and that this Cold War spy fiction deal had been done better. I do wanna give Purdom another chance in the future.
Howard Waldrop debuted in 1972, apparently one of the last authors to be discovered by John W. Campbell, but he would quickly head off in a very different direction from the house of Analog. Waldrop’s fiction can be russtic and nostalgic, sometimes positing what-if scenarios, most famously in his World Fantasy-winning story “The Ugly Chickens,” an alternate history in which the dodo had not gone extinct in the 17th century. His short fiction is what has secured his legacy, since Waldrop had only put out one solo novel, Them Bones in 1984. In the introductory blurb for today’s story, Gardner Dozois says Waldrop was working on a novel titled I, John Mandeville, but this book never materialized. In an age where authors hopped on novel-writing for that bigger paycheck, or even started out as novelists before moving “down” to short fiction for funzies, Waldrop is one of the few notable SFF authors of his generation who was almost a pure short fiction writer. He death last month has left a hole in the field.
Both readers and writers must’ve really liked “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” since it was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and placed third in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novelette. I also really liked it! I’m surprised I haven’t read more Waldrop since the few stories of his I’ve read have been certified bangers; but then he also wasn’t that prolific a writer, so I ought to savor it. There’s definitely a hint of autobiography with this one, as the narrator is a about a few years younger than Waldrop and is an Austin denizen.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Its quality was immediately noted, as Gardner Dozois would reprint it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection. It then appeared in the Waldrop collections Night of the Cooters and Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader.
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The plot is simple. “The Class of ’69 was having its twentieth high school reunion.” The story takes place in what would’ve been a very near but decidedly alternate future—a 1989 that’s different from what the year ended up being but otherwise is close enough to reality to be plausible. It’s this near-future element that qualifies the story as SF—that and the ending, although I’ll try not get ahead of myself here. The narrator, Frank Bledsoe, is pushing forty and makes his living as a handyman. “I help people move a lot. In Austin, if you have a pickup, you have friends for life.” Austin. Feels like a Richard Linklater movie. This story is much more about characters and speculation than plot, so pardon me if my reviews sounds a little disjointed. This is a very hard story to spoil. It’s totally possible Frank is a stand-in for Waldrop, but I don’t know enough about Waldrop to make that assessment. There’s less a plot and more a series of reminiscences connecting to a single event—in this case the reunion.
Frank is a passive protagonist: he doesn’t really do anything, which would be a problem if this was an action narrative. Instead it almost reads like autobiography, with a strong dose of self-reflection. I mean why not, it’s been twenty years since he graduated high school. It’s been ten years since I graduated high school, and I’ll be honest, I barely remember anything from that time in my life. I was on the wrestling team, until a leg injury junior year convinced me to quit. I didn’t have my first serious relationsip until about a month before graduating, and that whole thing (three years!) was a mistake (I was immature and I wish I had treated her a lot better than I did). I don’t talk to any of the friends I had in high school. People, Frank included, are able to recall their teen years with crystal clarity, but I just can’t. I was an outcast who was very likely autistic and, as it turns out, someone with bipolar disorder who would go undiagnosed for ten years. Things were very different in 2014. We had a Democrat president who had backed a mass murder campaign in the Middle East, and Taylor Swift was seemingly everywhere in the press and on the radio. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that different. People much older than me have a better sense of time passing.
Part of me wonders if Waldrop had not envisioned “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” as a non-SF story, maybe something he would’ve sold to The New Yorker or somewhere else that probably pays better than Asimov’s. Most of the story barely even registers as speculative, which I can see as a problem for some people. Of course, the reality is that the market for non-genre short fiction is rather small, or at least pales in comparison to the wealth of potential buyers in genre fiction. It’s also totally possible Waldrop started writing with the ending in mind, in which case it’s intentionally designed as a non-SF story that suddenly explodes into something else in the climax. Waldrop has an uncanny ability to evoke the ordinary, slightly altered by an ingredient of his own making. “The Ugly Chickens” could be a literary short story that teachers would make students read in high school, except for the whole dodo thing. “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” could be a literary coming-of-age narrative, like Stephen King’s The Body, if not for the whole aliens-causing-a-blackout bit. This story could be just a middle-aged dude reflecting on years past, but have you heard of this band called Distressed Flag Sale and a gnarly show they wanna put on…?
But then the story is less about Frank and more about the time of his youth, the state the US was in, the future that failed to happen. By his own admission he’s not a very interesting person. “I care a lot. I’m fairly intelligent, and I have a sense of humor. You know, the doormat personality,” he tells us. Thing is, Frank is not unique. Indeed much of the story is him finding that his former comrades have largely moved away from their radical youths and slipped into unassuming lives. This is a story about people who would’ve graduated high school in the late ’60s, about those who would’ve been old enough get drafted into the Vietnam War; in other words, this is a story about boomers. Waldrop seems to be in search of an anwer to a question that pertains to people of his generation: Why are boomers like that? Why does the average boomer seem so tired and reactionary? In a less charitable way of putting it, why is the average boomer a coward? Didn’t these people attend Woodstock? Didn’t they make a ruckus at the 1968 Democratic National Convention? What happened to these people? Why had their fighting spirit gone the way of the dodo? Can’t just be old age. Waldrop implicitly gives us a few answers to this question, by way of illustrating how times changes for the boomers between 1969 and 1989.
For one, not everyone boomer was a hippie—pretty far from it. Pop culture tends to do some funny shit, not the least of it being a tendency to co-opt radical movements of the past. Remember when ultra-capitalist Beyoncé appropriated Black Panther attire? Remember when milquetoast liberal Aaron Sorkin turned the leftist Chicago Seven into a pack of like-minded liberals? People, in “remembering” the hippies of the late ’60s and early ’70s, tend to paint these people as a) not as politically subversive as reality dictates, and b) more popular at the time than was the case. Truth is there were a lot of bootlickers among the youth at that time. One of the more memorable characters in Waldrop’s story is Hoyt Lawton, a classmate who was about as straight-laced as they came and who would go on to be a yuppie. “He won a bunch of money from something like the DAR for a speech he made at a Young Republicans convention on how all hippies needed was a good stiff tour of duty in Vietnam that would show them what America was all about.” There were a lot of Hoyts in the US (there still are, actually), and these people went on to vote for Reagan and “master” the stock market. Donald Trump is one such boomer we all know.
The Democratic National Convention. The moon landing. The Manson murders. Altamont. Kent State. This all happened in a period of two years and basically destroyed hippies’ reputation as a genuinely subversive group working towards the betterment of mankind. The so-called New Left came into conflict with itself. Leftist groups like the Black Panthers were being systematically targeted by the government. War protesters were being arrested. It was a bad time to be an American who was not a bootlicker. Maybe the real eccentrics—those, say, in Austin, who really believed in the cause—were being worn out. The guys in Distressed Flag Sale (now renamed Lizard Level) got arrested on bogus drug charges in 1970 and that forced the band to split up. 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots. The burgeoning queer community was then torn to shreds by AIDS, by the government deliberate ignoring of the virus. AIDS does get brought up in the story, sort of in passing; a shame none of the characters are explicitly queer, feel like that was a missed opportunity. We would not have Pride parades without riots. Queer liberation is inherently distrutful of government. God, imagine the work we could’ve accomplished with the hippies. This is a future that failed to happen, or rather wasn’t allowed to happen.
There Be Spoilers Here
So, that reunion. Distressed Flag Signal play some ’60s classics, but then their frontman drunkenly comes out, saying they’re gonna play a song that nobody would’ve heard—a song that existed only by way of reputation, like a myth. It’s called “Life Is Like That” and was due to be on their upcoming album (which never materialized due to the breakup), called either New Music for the AfterPeople or A Song to Change the World. “It was a great song, man, a great song. […] It was going to change the world we thought. […] We were gonna play it that night, and the world was gonna change, but instead they got us, they got us, man, and we were the ones that got changed, not them.” And then something very strange happens. The song has a hypnotic effect on the crowd, and I don’t mean just in the way good music will make people bump in the club, but it seems to draw the whole building into a frenzy. First a few hundred people, but then it builds—goes beyond the building. A few hundred people dancing turns into a few thousand, people dancing in the streets, people forming conga lines, people feeling a kind of insane euphoria that comes through either great sex, drugs, or a bipolar manic episode. The song does what the band hoped it would: it changes people. A literal infection of music that spreads throiughout the land.
One must imagine them happy, even as they dance until their legs give out. It’s sort of ambiguous as to whether the ending is supposed to be fully good or bittersweet, but still, these people are happy; for some of them it might be sheer happiness for the first time in two decades. It’s an ending that leaps straight into the fantastic, and its inexplicableness and potential meaning boost this story for me.
A Step Farther Out
How much you enjoy this story might depend on how much you’re willing to connect with people of a certain generation—people who, at this point, are starting to die from old age. One reason this could’ve been reprinted only once in the past thirty years is that it’s a story written in the ’80s about the ’80s, and more specifically about people who were old enough in the ’80s to be raising families of their own. And, let’s face it, boomers don’t exactly have a good reputation among millennials and younger people like myself. My simple counterargument is twofold, a) that Waldrop is pretty good at what he does, and b) if we make no attempt to understand previous generations then what hope do we have of not repeating their mistakes? I take an amateur’s interest in the historical context of really any fiction, although it helps if said fiction is good—which this is.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 