Tag: clifford d. simak

Short Story Review: “Dusty Zebra” by Clifford D. Simak

August 20th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, September 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Clifford Simak had already been around for two decades when Galaxy premiered with the October 1950 issue, and this brave new magazine seemed to give the veteran writer’s career a second wind—or at the very least coincided with it. The ’50s would be a golden age for Simak (like with a lot of fellow genre writers), with the early ’50s alone seeing four novels from him (as opposed to just one in the previous twenty years combined), including his masterpiece City. Simak wrote a truly enormous amount of short fiction this decade, on top of the novels, and his outlet of choice was Galaxy. The reasons as to why Simak preferred Galaxy over the competition aren’t totally clear; it could be (I think I recall this) that he came to find John W. Campbell’s meddling to be too exhausting, although he still occasionally contributed to Astounding/Analog in the ’50s and ’60s. Simak has been sort of pigeonholed as a vaguely conservative writer, mostly due to his focusing on rural settings and peoples (that he’s a pastoralist can’t be denied), but a deeper reading of his fiction and reading the tragically few interviews we have with him show him to be a more complicated person. (We’re talking about someone who claimed to reread The Grapes of Wrath every year.) “Dusty Zebra” sounds at first like it might be a straightforward bartering-saves-the-day narrative, similar to Simak’s own “The Big Front Yard” (reviewed here), but it’s more of a humorous cautionary tale.

Also, I’m sorry that this is being posted later in the day than what would be ideal. My daily life has not been great.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has been reprinted in Alpha 9 (ed. Robert Silverberg) and the Simak collections The Worlds of Clifford Simak and Dusty Zebra and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

Joe is a business-minded family man, whose son Bill happens to be even more business-minded (ripping off other schoolkids by trading junk for things with actual value), and one day while looking for stamps in his work desk he finds out something very odd: there’s a tiny dot on the desk, and if an object passes through it it goes—somewhere. Seemingly vanishes into thin air. And yet something takes its place. Joe puts random crap on the dot and gets back neat little gadgets, like a pen that also transforms into a fishing rod, and especially there’s the dust-collector, a kind of vacuum that sucks up dust and makes it disappear. Where does the dust go? Not sure. Joe encourages Bill’s schoolyard trading, so it makes sense that he would be interested in what turns out to be an trans-dimensional portal, the only problem then being that while Joe has business sense he doesn’t have technical sense; so in comes Lewis, the next door neighbor, who can explain the gadgetry and mechanics of the strange little dot. (Something you may notice about Simak is that a lot of the time his protagonists are not scientists at all, but they happen to be friends with someone who is scientifically minded and who can explain the SFnal elements of the story.) Before long Joe and Lewis form a business partnership around the trading, complete with a deliberately convoluted contract, and of course Joe tries to lessen Lewis’s share at every opportunity. Simak protagonists are often well-meaning, but they can also at times fall on the anti-hero end of the spectrum, which Joe very much is; not that he’s evil or anything, but he’s a capitalist at heart, maybe a little less human than the average Simak protagonist.

The recurring trade-off throughout the stories is that for some reason the person (called “the Trader”) on the other side of the portal really likes these cheap zebra bracelets that Joe happened to have, and in return for this seemingly useless trinket the humans get a dust-collector in return. The humans find that they can trade in the useless garbage for some pretty useful items, which can then be turned for a profit. We never do learn where the dot came from, who’s responsible for it, or even what the Trader looks like. This is all rather inexplicable, although there’s just enough scientific mumbo jumbo thrown in to keep this away from being fantasy. A lot of Simak’s stories can be thought of less as hard-nosed SF and more like machine fables, in which technology figures into the setting and moral of the story, but the actual plausibility of the tech is a distant second. The dot-as-portal is ridiculous, and also this seems like a very easy way to send over a deadly weapon, or an object that could carry diseases. If we’re to take the Trader as an alien, though, it makes sense that such a figure would be more or less benign in Simak’s book. I often think of Simak as an anti-Lovecraft figure, in that when Simak characters encounter the unknown it’s very rare for the unknown to pose a serious threat. Simak’s aliens, including the Trader, are often curious creatures who can be reasoned with on some level, such as, for instance, bartering being the common ground between humanity and the aliens in “The Big Front Yard.” I assumed “Dusty Zebra” would be a similarly straightforward first-contact story in which bartering is shown as a force for good; and while the bartering itself turns out to be fine, the get-rich-quick scheme Joe and Lewis concoct will have consequences neither of them would’ve wanted or expected.

So about the zebra bracelets. How do the humans and the Trader, well, trade? How do they understand each other? Short answer is, they don’t—at least not beyond a picture book language that even a toddler can understand; but this rudimentary language turns out to be just enough. Joe and company get the bright idea to use one of Bill’s picture books (one showing items as standing in for letters of the alphabet, so A is for apple, etc.) to show the Trader what they have for inventory, and the Trader sends the book back with the desired item marked. One problem: they forgot (or didn’t notice) that the item on the Z page is a zebra—and the Trader wants one of those. Now you may be thinking, that’s a whole-ass animal. Where you would even get one for sale? But as Joe says, after taking some “advice” from Bill, “[The Trader] doesn’t know a zebra is an animal, or, if he does, how big it is!” This is of course an example of ripping someone in a deal off, but as Joe rationalizes, if the Trader can’t tell the difference then what harm is being done? “If the Trader had any qualms about what was happening, he gave no sign of it. He seemed perfectly happy to send us dust collectors so long as we sent him zebras.” This is a partnership that seems to be working, for now. A certain question does linger, though: Where does all the dust that the dust-collectors pick up go? Conceivably it has to go somewhere, and the Trader doesn’t seem to be getting the dust back…

There Be Spoilers Here

Our Anti-Heroes™ have been making a killing on the gadgets, only the problem is that they can’t figure out how to reverse engineer them so as to manufacture them themselves. To really make a killing on the dust-collectors you would need at least a few thousand, but how would you get them? The Trader apparently wants more zebra bracelet charms in exchange for the dust-collectors, and those charms have since been discontinued. In what is admittedly a far-fetched turn of events Joe (this is after making a great deal of money) is able to make a deal with the charm manufacturer, and soon enough the house gets filled with literally thousands of the damn things. The good news is that they get more dust-collectors! In fact too many of them. So, there seems to be a third party in this, or so Joe suspects: clearly the dust must be going somewhere, and in the last stretch of the story it all comes back—pounds of the stuff across multiple households. Joe’s house alone gets filled with dust that seems to have come from another dimension, but maybe not the Trader’s. Then the dot vanishes. We never do find out why the Trader cuts off communication or what he could be doing with all those zebra charms. Maybe he (or they) realized he had gotten ripped off and decided some payback was needed. Or maybe there’s another dimension all the dust goes to and they didn’t like that very much. Point being that a combination of lawsuits and being unable to replicate the gadgets brings Joe and company pretty much back to square one by the end. I like how there’s some mystery retained with the Trader by the end, so that not only did the humans pay for their profit-seeking but that they’re also left wondering what could be going on in those other dimensions.

A Step Farther Out

In a way this is minor Simak, in that it doesn’t take itself very seriously. It’s also not very SFnal, indeed bordering on fantasy—possibly even cosmic horror. Or rather cosmic humor. It’s a story about some entertaining if also unlikable people who think they can get something with minimal effort and reap the benefits. Had this been a Henry Kuttner or C. M. Kornbluth story the ending would’ve been much more unforgiving towards the humans, but ultimately it was written to be in good fun. Simak is not dead-serious that often, but just because he tends to be on the lighthearted (or at least forgiving) side doesn’t mean he can’t make a solid point. I actually think we still don’t give him enough credit.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “No Life of Their Own” by Clifford D. Simak

August 3rd, 2024

(Cover by Wallace Wood. Galaxy, August 1959.)

Who Goes There?

Few authors hit the ground running, making their debut more or less fully formed creatively, but then even fewer authors can be said to have had their creative peak three decades into their careers. Clifford Simak is one such rarity, as he made his genre debut in 1931, only to start putting out really good work consistently by the ’50s. The stories that would make up his 1952 “novel” City were mostly written in the ’40s, but it was in the ’50s that Simak set a high bar both in the quality and quantity of his work. He wrote at a mile a minute at this time, mostly short fiction for the newfangled Galaxy, which he had taken such a quick liking to that his novel Time and Again (serialized as Time Quarry) had its first installment in Galaxy‘s inaugural issue. Rarely do an author and a magazine have such chemistry together, but in the ’50s and early ’60s the two were all but inseparable. Simak was born on August 3rd, 1904, so 120 years ago today. His career spanned from the early ’30s to the early ’80s, right as the cyberpunk movement was kicking into gear. Nowadays he reads as a breath of fresh air compared to the more urban and macho works of his contemporaries, as he was a diehard Midwesterner and pastoralist. “No Life of Their Own” similarly is very Midwestern and very pastoral, and for better or worse (I would say better) it serves as a good entry point for Simak’s unique charm.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1959 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted in Tomorrow’s Children (ed. Isaac Asimov) and the Simak collections All the Traps of Earth and Other Stories and No Life of Their Own and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

It’s unclear how old Steve the narrator is when he’s recounting this story, but we’re told of one summer vacation during his childhood when life on the farm got mighty strange—as in stranger than normal. Steve and his parents are your average farmers in the American heartland, although lately the family’s luck hasn’t been good. “The tomato crop had failed and two of the cows had died and a bear had robbed the bees and busted up the hives and the tractor had broken down and cost $78.90 to get fixed.” Their neighbors aren’t doing much better for the most part, not least because said neighbors aren’t from around these parts—indeed, they’re not even from this planet. Steve doesn’t have human boys his age to play with, so instead he hangs out with the kids of alien families, who themselves are of different species. We never learn the real names of these other kids, but we get nicknames since Steve finds their real names too hard to pronounce: we have Fancy Pants, Nature Boy, and Butch. Fancy Pants, as you can guess, thinks a little highly of himself and even gets around by levitating, as is the norm for his race. Nature Boy is of a furry but still humanoid race and gets along with the local wildlife. Butch is the son of a well-to-do man who worked as an optometrist on his home planet but who has moved to Earth to try his luck at farming. Thing is, the only farmer in the “neighborhood” who’s been having good luck is the only other human farmer mentioned, Andy Carter, whom nobody likes and who apparently has a foul temper.

The plot is a bit loose, so first I’d like to focus on some of the details, as I think they paint a more vivid portrait than the actual events of the story. This is a concise example of how Simak likes to write aliens, which is to say he likes to write aliens who are basically humanoid and who can be understood by humans on at least some level. The aliens in “No Life of Their Own,” even the more “villainous” ones (which we’ll get to), are especially akin to humans, and it probably doesn’t hurt that here the families of the boys Steve befriends are clearly stand-ins for real-world migrant workers. Mind you that when Simak started writing SF in the ’30s the migrant worker was typically thought of as a white American from the rural Midwest who has traveled to California, or somewhere else along either coast. We’re talking about a sympathetic view of immigrants possibly informed by The Grapes of Wrath and other works that were quite left-leaning and pro-worker—and which in the ’30s were also successful with readers. “No Life of Their Own” was published in 1959 but very much evokes rural life in the ’30s and earlier, which makes sense since Simak grew up in Wisconsin in the early years of the 20th century. Come to think of it, I do wonder if Simak was influenced by John Steinbeck, especially given how Steinbeckian(?) this story feels. It’s a somewhat idealized depiction of farm life, but that’s justified I think given how Simak had actually lived through it and how ultimately this is about one man looking back on an episode of his childhood. This is not a story about racism exactly, although it’s very much an anti-xenophobia narrative in which the humans and several alien races all find common ground—including the “halflings” who kick the plot into gear.

The boys discover that Andy Carter unknowingly has a group of short humanoid aliens (hence them being called halflings) helping him tend the land, the only problem then being that the adults, for some reason, can’t see them. They ask Butch’s dad about it and for better or worse he knows how these halflings work—that they’re kind of a nuisance back where Butch’s dad comes from and that they’re basically a race of mimics, latching onto a “host” and taking after that person’s appearance. Thing is, these halflings always work in groups, or rather in little tribes, and if they latch onto one person than everyone else close in proximity will suffer. “For,” says Butch’s dad, “it is an axiom that fortune for one man is misfortune for the rest.” We then get two problems, a practical and ethical one: What do we do about these halflings? and, Is it right to interfere with the Carter farm like this? Of course Carter doesn’t know he’s getting free help, but he’ll sure as shit notice the difference once the halflings are somehow removed from the picture. This brings up another problem: Can the halflings be reasoned with? Would it be possible to negotiate? Given that this is Simak I don’t think I’d be spoiling things by saying yes, the halflings are ultimately reasonable creatures. (I struggle to think of aliens in Simak’s fiction that can’t be reasoned with in human terms at all.) So the halflings exist on some weird dimensional level that make them transparent, although Butch’s dad is at least able to design a pair of glasses that would allow kids to see them; after all, this is still rooted in science, not magic. Well, maybe a bit of magic. The kids can see the halflings with these special glasses, but adults still can’t see them. As Butch’s dad explains to Steve’s dad, “You and I are too fixed in reality.” So, what to do about the halflings?

Before we get into real spoilers, a few other things to note. While farm life as shown here is written in kind of a rose-tinted fashion, Simak’s evocation of childhood feels genuine, helped by the boys being written such that they come off as actual kids—if not necessarily “alien” in the case of Steve’s friends. The boys like to pull pranks and rough-house, which actually causes the plot to escalate, and they also look up to their dads. This is very much a boy’s world, with the only female character showing up (that I recall) being Steve’s mom, who serves as comfort for him in the back end when Our Heroes™ are at their lowest point. This is also about a time and place when corporal punishment (namely belting) was still very much the norm, and Steve doesn’t think anything of his dad beating him, even with hindsight. Just as curiously, while these are rural folks, futuristic technology is by no means absent, as the boys have a few gadgets to play with, including a “live-it” which seems to be a VR headset (virtual reality here being a reasonable extrapolation on what would’ve been the TV boom in the ’50s), and also a “hopper,” which as far as I can tell is some kind of teleportation device. There’s a weird little episode in the middle involving a cat getting caught in one of these hoppers, which I thought a needless digression, although it does foreshadow a more serious mishap regarding this bit of tech. Generally this is a story more rooted in characters and ideas than the plot, which on the one hand you could argue it could’ve been tightened up to become a novelette, but also my counterpoint is that the vibes are kind of immaculate. Simak’s stories are often quite pleasant, if not always memorable (he does phone it in sometimes), but this is a fairly memorable story of his.

There Be Spoilers Here

Fancy Pants getting payback at Nature Boy for a prank involving a skunk leads to Nature Boy getting teleported to the dimension the halflings are in, rendering him invisible—at least without the glasses. The families panic over this, understandably, but they hatch a plan to rescue Nature Boy—and maybe get their hands on one of the halflings while their at it. The halflings are what cause this whole plot to kick off, but I like the idea that petty antics between kids are what heighten the stakes. Anyway, The plan is (naturally) a success, and they even manage to get a word with one of the halflings, who not only resembles Carter but also talks like him. This is a bit disturbing, but Our Heroes™ quickly learn that the halflings can’t help who they mimic really. What the halflings really want, as it turns out, are those live-it sets, one for each of them. The halflings mimic other people’s actions, because they seem preconditioned for it but also they like watching other people; it’s their main pastime. The live-it is like an immersive and personal TV set, therefore the halflings see it as pretty neat. Simak makes a pretty curious suggestion here about technology and entertainment, as said through Fancy Pants’s dad. It’s not necessarily “correct,” but it’s interesting.

“There was a time when the human race found it necessary to congregate in families and tribes for companionship and entertainment. Then the race got the record player and the radio and TV and there was less need for get-togethers. A man had entertainment of his own in his home. He need not move beyond his living room to be entertained. So the spectator and group sports simply petered out.”

Simak lived through the birth of radio and TV, and while these mediums started as aimed at groups or families, something to play in the kitchen or living room (you would only have on TV set in the whole house then), he postulated (I think at least somewhat correctly) that these modes of “entertainment” would become more personalized, so that everyone would have their own radio or TV set. What used to be a group activity will become more individualistic. The conflict at the heart of “No Life of Their Own” is resolved by the farmers making a deal with the halflings, to give them live-it sets and have them disperse so that they wouldn’t group around a single property. It’s hard to gauge how Simak feels about his own solution for the problem, because it does solve the problem, but also he seems ambivalent about the prospect of people not coming together as often for entertainment, or more generally for shared experiences. There’s a little tinge of bitterness to what is otherwise a happy ending (well, except for Fancy Pants, who gets “grounded”), which I think makes it memorable.

A Step Farther Out

Despite being the title story in one volume of that recent series collecting all of Simak’s short fiction, I do wish “No Life of Their Own” got reprinted more often. This is typical Simak in broad strokes, but it’s the little things (especially when you’ve read enough Simak like me) that pulled me in and kept me thinking about it after I had finished reading it. It’s a short novella that, like “The Big Front Yard,” more or less gives you a crash course in what you can expect from Simak and what makes him different from other genre SF writers of the time. There are some surprisingly incisive statements here about technology and race relations that are lurking beneath a charming and somewhat childlike pastoralism.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: August 2024

August 1st, 2024
(Cover by Hisaki Yasuda. Asimov’s, April 1988.)

Not much to update on for this month, although I did decide to shake things up for slightly for what I’ll be covering. See, for a while I was gonna do a whole tribute month for Clifford Simak, like I did for Fritz Leiber almost two years ago; but truth be told I’m not sure if I’ll do a whole month of reviews for one author like that again. It can be fatiguing to read a ton from one author, even one as diverse in his output as Leiber; and I can tell you Simak is not as diverse. I do have a compromise, though, since it’s gonna be the man’s 120th birthday in two days and I wanted to do something special. So instead of one Simak story we’re getting two. Not only that, but I’m making an exception for my “one story per magazine a month” rule (excepting F&SF this year, as you know) so as to pick two Simak stories from the pages of Galaxy Science Fiction. Simak was such a prolific contributor to Galaxy that I feel it’s only right to double dip here.

Another quirky choice I decided to pull was this month’s complete novel, which is not only a certified classic of “literary” fiction but a fantasy novel that people tend to not think of as such. Whether The Man Who Was Thursday “really” counts as fantasy was a point of contention even when it was printed in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, with people in the letters column loving the novel but questioning its fantasy credentials. But fuck you, I’m counting it. Aside from Simak we have a fairly diverse roster of writers, none of whom I’ve previously covered on here. We also have a few stories I would consider appropriate for summer reading, in that they take place in warm climates and/or involve aquatic life.

Let’s see here…

For the novellas:
1. “No Life of Their Own” by Clifford D. Simak. From the August 1959 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. For the story I picked to cover on Simak’s birthday I figured I may as well pick a story that also had an August release date. When Simak restarted his writing career in the late ’30s he would be a regular at Astounding Science Fiction for the next decade, but in the ’50s it quickly became apparent Galaxy would be his new go-to outlet. Incidentally the ’50s also saw Simak’s most prolific period as a short fiction writer.
2. “Surfacing” by Walter Jon Williams. From the April 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Williams had started out as a “mainstream” writer in the early ’80s, but by the latter half of that decade he had moved to writing SF. His rise to prominence happened to coincide with the cyberpunk movement. Bit of a funny story: this is a semi-reread for me, since I got about halfway through “Surfacing” a year or so ago, but due to circumstances outside of my control I wasn’t able to finish it at the time. I’m correcting that now.
For the short stories:
1. “Retrograde Summer” by John Varley. From the February 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Varley debuted in 1974 and within just a couple years rose as arguably the most imaginative and exhilarating new writer in the field. His Eight Worlds stories especially (of which “Retrograde Summer” is one) pointed towards a writer who was a breath of fresh air at the time.
2. “The Voices of Time” by J. G. Ballard. From the October 1960 issue of New Worlds. Ballard would later see mainstream recognition, of a sort, with his highly controversial novel Crash and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun. In the ’60s, however, Ballard was known as one of the quintessential figures in the New Wave. This story is an example of early Ballard, from before the New Wave.
3. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” by Octavia E. Butler. From the May 1987 issue of Omni. Butler was a respected author in her lifetime, winning multiple awards, but her reputation seems to have gotten a second wind in the years following her death. She was a somewhat prolific novelist, but she wrote very few short stories—which didn’t mean there was a dip in quality.
4. “Dusty Zebra” by Clifford D. Simak. From the September 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Simak had been with Galaxy from literally that magazine’s first issue, with the serialization of his novel Time Quarry (or Time and Again), and from there he was a constant presence. Given the subject matter, “Dusty Zebra” may or may not be a precursor to Simak’s more famous “The Big Front Yard.”
5. “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer. From the November-December 2023 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Kritzer has been around for a while—actually way longer than you’d think, considering she only started getting real awards attention in the 2010s. This story here just won the Nebula, and is currently a finalist for the Hugo, making it the most recent story I’ll have covered.
6. “There Used to Be Olive Trees” by Rich Larson. From the January-February 2017 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I remember reading a few Larson stories in the past and assuming he was older than he really was, which says something about his skill. Larson made his debut in the early 2010s while still a teenager, and has been writing at a mile a minute ever since.
For the complete novel:
1. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton. From the March 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. First published in 1908. This is kind of a treat for myself, since not only is this a reread but The Man Who Was Thursday is also one of my favorite novels. Chesterton is known for his Father Brown detective series, and for being a celebrated Catholic apologist; but before his conversion he wrote one of the pioneering (and still one of the weirdest) espionage novels with this month’s pick. Interestingly this seems to be one of the rare cases of a “complete” novel in FFM actually being unabridged, the only omission being a poem at the beginning dedicated to a friend of Chesterson’s which is not part of the novel itself.
Won’t you read with me?
Novella Review: “Immigrant” by Clifford D. Simak

August 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, March 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Clifford Simak is one of my favorite discoveries of the past few years, in that he’s exactly the kind of author I like to show off to people who think so-called Golden Age SF is just this or that. Simak debuted in 1931, which would make him a bit of an oldster by the time John W. Campbell took over Astounding in late 1937; but whereas some authors merely adapted to the new standard and were lucky to do that, Simak actually got better as time went on. He wrote most of the stories that would comprise City in the ’40s, with 1944 alone seeing four of them in print. These were some of the best and most emotionally fulfilling short stories of the era, even surpassing most literary fiction of the time in my opinion. The ’50s then saw a period of immense productivity for Simak, mostly in the pages of Galaxy, where he played well with authors two decades his junior.

“Immigrant” was one of the few major Simak stories in the ’50s to be published in Astounding, and without giving the game away at the start, I can see why it was published there and not in Galaxy. This is a bit of an unusual Simak story in that it takes place entirely away from Earth, as instead we find ourselves on an alien planet with a race of powerful and condescending aliens. It’s also rather foreboding—for the most part.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was most recently reprinted in The Shipshape Miracle and Other Stories, which seems to only have an ebook edition. Sigh. You gotta go back to the ’90s for a paperback reprint. The most relevant for me has to be Galactic Empires Volume One (ed. Brian Aldiss), which is not an anthology you’d expect to see a Simak story in.

Enhancing Image

Going into this I thought it would be a coming-of-age narrative featuring a juvenile protagonist; well, it is a coming-of-age narrative in a sense, but there are a few twists. Our Hero™ is Selden Bishop, a 29-year-old genius who, through rigorous testing and passing a certain exam, gained the privilege of traveling to Kimon, apparently the most prosperous and alluring planet in the known galaxy. In this distant future, humanity knows it’s far from the only sentient race in the galaxy, and yet Kimon stands out among its neighbors as being where you wanna go if you wanna make it big; only thing is that a tiny fraction of humans (such that they can only be an extreme minority on Kimon) are allowed to enter.

Kimon was a galactic El Dorado, a never-never land, the country at the rainbow’s foot. There were few who did not dream of going there, and there were many who aspired, but those who were chosen were a very small percentage of those who tried to make the grade and failed.

The other thing is that those who are lucky enough to land on Kimon have been awfully cryptic in their letters to Earth for decades. It’s a shame Simak did not anticipate social media, as it would then be much harder to keep the exact relationship between humans and Kimonians a secret. Anyway, Bishop is here because he earned it, but also to do a sort of job for Morley, his Earth contact, which is to figure out what is actually happening on Kimon and what the humans are supposed to be doing there. No, despite the Kimonians being humanoid and very handsome (akin to tall bronze statues), there’s no implication of cross-breeding between humans and Kimonians; this is still a John W. Campbell magazine, after all. What Bishop discovered will be much more aligned with Campbell’s interests, but that’s for later. Much of the first half of “Immigrant” involves Bishop figuring out the basics and how to get a job, since he still needs one of those.

Like other immigrants from Earth, Bishop is sent to stay at a hotel that’s almost quite literally in the middle of nowhere, with “nothing, absolutely nothing, but rolling countryside” outside the hotel. There are no roads on Kimone, nor do there seem to be cities. While Simak does pander to Campbell somewhat in this story, the pastoralism of Kimon is surely Simak’s treat to himself. Actually the decadent ruralism of the Kimonians reminds me of what became of future humanity in Campbell’s own “Forgetfulness,” wherein mankind, in developing psi powers, forgets how to use technology as said technology becomes no longer needed. The Kimonians themselves are natural psi users, being able to communicate with each other across distances without tech via telepathy and teleportation; naturally, and more creepily, they can also read human minds.

As for the Kimonians themselves, they’re kinda… well, they’re like Vulcans: they’re a bunch of assholes. Not in an actively malicious way, but more in that they clearly think of humans as “cute.” Bishop can’t have a real conversation with them. The good news is that while the number of humans on Kimon is incredibly small, the humans have been clustered together such that it doesn’t take long for Bishop to make at least one new friend, namely Maxine, who to her credit does not exist to be Bishop’s love interest. Maxine has been here for a while now and not only understands the Kimonians to a better degree, but is capable of doing a couple things that normal humans ought not to be able to do. Unfortunately Maxine is also a pessimist who assumes the Kimonians just wanna play an epic prank of their human visitors—not that the Kimonians try hard to disprove this.

To make it in this new world, as surely the Irish and Italians had to in 19th century America, Bishop will have to know a whole new rulebook. “You have to adapt,” he thinks at one point. “You’d have to adapt and play the Kimon game, for they were the ones who would set the rules.” Whatever that game is. Eventually he sucks up his pride and goes to ask for a job, which true enough will have a very healthy paycheck by human standards, though it’s far from glamorous. Occupation? Babysitter.

What I like about “Immigrant” is that it’s too packed to work as a short story but too slight to be stretched to a 50,000-word novel; it’s a fine example of what can be done with the novella mode—specifically the short novella where we’re looking at 17,500 to 25,000 words. I suspect Simak wrote this for Astounding because of the paycheck, but also because Astounding usually ran a novella in each issue, with the only rival to both have such a policy and offer such a healthy paycheck being Galaxy. Still, this is not what I would call “major” Simak. It took me four days to read “Immigrant,” partly due to work but also I was not exactly glued to my screen. It’s hard to call boring, but it also meanders enough that I was not sure, while reading, about the point Simak was trying to make until the end. For those of you who are wary of Simak because of his sentimentality, though, you may be pleasantly surprised at how not sentimental “Immigrant” is.

There Be Spoilers Here

The “babysitting” job turns out to be a lot more taxing than Bishop assumed. For one, the Kimonian children he looks after seem totally capable of taking care of themselves, but worse is that they don’t seem to even acknowledge him as an adult figure; indeed, to the Kimonian children, Bishop is, at best, like a fellow child. When being introduced to the children they give him human names—for the sake of his convenience. “They are approximations,” says one. “They are as close […] as he can pronounce them,” says another. These are Kimonian names which Bishop is not equipped to understand; like with most everything else on the planet it’s a door he’s not allowed to open—at least not yet. Sure, the pay is extravagant, but Bishop finds “babysitting” these kids to be profoundly demeaning.

At first Bishop gets the idea that humans are allowed on Kimon to serve as pets, or at best as playmates for their children, since clearly a Kimonian child is treated as a more advanced being than an adult human with a college education. Most authors writing for most other outlets probably would’ve gone with the “humans are pets” option, predictable as that may sound now, but Simak is not like most authors; he believes, usually, that it’s possible for humans and other sentient races to treat each other with respect. I’m convinced at some point that Simak may have envisioned a downer ending wherein Bishop realizes that he and his fellow humans are mere playthings for the Kimonians—except for the fact that the Kimonians are natural psi users. Now, why would a story published in Astounding depict a “superior” alien race with psi powers while humans come off as a bunch of weaklings? Surely there’s a catch to this—and there is!

While overall I enjoy the previous Simak story I’ve covered, “The Big Front Yard,” (review here) more, I do think the solution to “Immigrant” is more justified, even if it still plays to Campbell’s interest. Simak may well have thought of the ending well in advance of writing the rest of the story; it doesn’t read like a last-minute addition. While I did not know how this story would end, I really should’ve made an educated guess from before the story even officially starts, as there’s a major clue. The opening blurb (probably written by Campbell) is clever in that while with hindsight it’s easy to see as spoiling the whole trajectory of the plot, there’s not enough context given to make a certain guess at the start.

After many years of work, the child graduates from grammar school—and is a freshman, in high school. After more years of work—he gets to be a freshman again. And if he is very, very wise, he might even get to be a
kindergarten student again…

Bishop thinks back on a few things, such as Maxine’s ability to teleport (a rudimentary ability by her estimate) and other strange things that have happened, and realizes something: these psi powers can be learned. Over time, and with the right mindset, humans can evolve to read minds, move objects, and yes, teleport to other places, just as the Kimonians do. “But before you could even start to absorb the culture, before you could start to learn, before you ever went to school, you’d have to admit that you didn’t know.” In order to learn these abilities (in which it would take years to do so), Bishop has to, in a way, become a child again. This 29-year-old man with a high IQ has to start his life over, with a new mindset, with the expectation that he’ll have to think as the Kimonians think if he wants to get to their level. But it can be done. The very last line of the story confirms Bishop’s theory: that the humans bright enough to go to Kimon are going back to school—this time to learn psi powers.

A Step Farther Out

I’m not quite sure how to feel about “Immigrant.” This is a story that ultimately plays to Campbell’s obsessions, namely his thing for psi powers and humanity evolving to a higher state of consciousness. I don’t think Simak’s view of humanity is so optimistic as depicted here and in “The Big Front Yard,” although he certainly wasn’t a misanthrope. On the other hand, much as I wanna think Simak may have had a different ending in mind in the event he could’ve sold it to Galaxy, I do think the ending was as intended from the start. It’s a bit of an eerie story, not horror but a little uneasy with how Kimon is depicted, until its swings upward at the end, like someone waving a flag in triumph. I may question the sincerity of it, but as is typical with Simak I respect the swerving-away from what might’ve been a horrific conclusion and instead choosing an ending that bodes well for everyone involved. Simak probably doesn’t believe humans can evolve into telepathic superbeings in a matter of months, but he may well believe that with some hard work and humility, mankind can redeem itself.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: August 2023

August 1st, 2023
(Cover by M. Isip. Unknown, March 1940.)

What the hell, a whole month went by and nothing crazy happened that wasn’t work-related. Well, the SFF magazines are being choked out by big daddy Bezos and Twitter is now no longer Twitter, but aside from that, everything has been pretty normal!

I’m being sarcastic.

To keep your mind off the fact that the short story within the context of genre publishing is an endangered species and that readers can hardly be bothered to support the lifeblood of the field, let’s read some stories! We have a curious set this month, focusing more on fantasy, which is not normally my thing; indeed the only science fiction stories covered this month are the novellas. Much like pushing myself just a little bit when trying a new food, fantasy is a genre I treat, paradoxically, with both caution and enthusiasm. Enough wasting time, though…

For the serials:
1. Skull-Face by Robert E. Howard. Serialized in Weird Tales, October to December 1929. Howard wrote for only twelve years, debuting in 1924 and stopping with his suicide in 1936—at age thirty. Most writers barely get their feet off the ground by the time they’re thirty, but not only was Howard a natural-born storyteller, he wrote at a blistering pace such that he still accumulated a vast body of work. Skull-Face is a standalone fantasy, predating Conan by a few years.
2. The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson. Serialized in Unknown, March to May 1940. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novel. This was not published in book form until 1964, a 24-year gap that normally would imply the author had died in the interim—only Williamson was not only alive but had another 42 years left in him. Was not Williamson’s first go at fantasy, but it marked his first appearance in Unknown, a new fantasy magazine with more exacting standards.
For the novellas:
1. “Immigrant” by Clifford D. Simak. From the March 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The review for this will be posted on Simak’s 119th birthday, which is the least we can do for the man. With the wave of “empathetic” and pastoral SF in recent years, especially the works of Becky Chambers, some have looked back to Simak (rightfully) as a direct ancestor. “Immigrant” hopefully will see Golden Age SF’s most compassionate writer in good form.
2. “Singleton” by Greg Egan. From the February 2002 issue of Interzone. I was gonna tackle “Oceanic” originally, but that seemed too obvious and maybe not characteristic of Egan’s work. I’ve been quasi-binging Egan’s short fiction as of late, because he interests me. Egan’s one of the major voices in transhumanist science fiction, as well as one of the first Aussie writers to leave a mark on the field. He’s also notoriously aloof; there are no pictures of him on the internet.
For the short stories:
1. “The Dreaming City” by Michael Moorcock. From the June 1961 issue of Science Fantasy. I’ve read a couple Moorcock stories before, but truth be told he’s one of those authors I’ve been slow to get around to because of a bad first impression. Let’s just say I’m not a fan of his essay “Starship Stormtroopers.” But still Moorcock has been an earnest chronicler of fantasy for the past six decades, and to celebrate we’re going back 62 years to the start of his Elric saga.
2. “Travels with My Cats” by Mike Resnick. From the February 2004 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo winner for Best Short Story. Resnick was one of the most popular and frequent contributors to Asimov’s in the ’90s and 2000s, winning three of his five Hugos there, with his Kirinyaga series being one of the most decorated in genre fiction. I intentionally picked a standalone story because the Kirinyaga stories kinda bug me, and also I like cats. 🙂
For the complete novel:
1. The Dwellers in the Mirage by A. Merritt. From the April 1941 issue of Fantastic Novels. During his life and in the years immediately following his death, Merritt was one of the most beloved American fantasists, at least among pulp readers; he even got a magazine named after him with A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine. Nowadays Merritt is obscure enough to have “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. The Dwellers in the Mirage was first published in 1932, but its printing in Fantastic Novels was the first time Merritt’s preferred ending was incorporated, making it the preferred version.
One last thing I wanna mention is that I’ll be revamping my method for reviewing serials. I’ll be writing about the first installment in the same way as usual, but I’ve come to realize that for subsequent installments there are a couple sections of my review formula that are really unnecessary; for example we don’t need an introductory section where I give context to the author if we’re already in the middle of a work by said author. As such you can expect a more streamlined reading experience when we get to the second installment of Howard’s Skull-Face. Things will look a bit different, but this is less a radical change and more like tweaking. Other than that, my review schedule should be back to normal.

Won’t you read with me?
Novella Review: “The Big Front Yard” by Clifford D. Simak

August 10th, 2022

(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, October 1958.)

Who Goes There?

Clifford D. Simak is one of the most respected writers to come out of the so-called Golden Age of science fiction—this despite the fact that he was actually a pre-Golden Age practitioner of SF, having made his debut in 1931 with “The World of the Red Sun.” Simak became one of John W. Campbell’s regular authors in the ’40s, and then, without skipping a beat, he started submitting frequently to Galaxy Science Fiction in the ’50s onward. Unlike a lot of noted Golden Age writers, Simak was thoroughly a pastoralist, and also a humanist; his fiction often involves fundamentally decent rural types in plots which are rarely life-or-death scenarios. His obvious contempt for urbanity is counterbalanced by a gentleness uncharacteristic of most SF authors of his era, and at his best he can be deeply emotionally effective.

When Simak wrote “The Big Front Yard” in 1958, he had already been in the game for 27 years, and he would remain quietly yet consistently active for 27 more. According to David W. Wixon’s introduction to the story in the collection The Big Front Yard and Other Stories, Simak had originally submitted this piece to H. L. Gold over at Galaxy, but Gold rejected it; he then took it to Campbell, and Campbell bought it without hesitation. “The Big Front Yard” would go on to win the 1959 Hugo for Best Novelette (the Best Novella category had not yet been invented), and it would go down as one of Simak’s most famous stories.

Placing Coordinates

“The Big Front Yard” has been reprinted a fair number of times, so you’ll have no problem finding it. Assuming you don’t mind reading online or with a PDF, the October 1958 issue of Astounding in which it originally appeared is on the Archive. As far as book reprints go we have some easy-to-find options, including the aforementioned The Big Front Yard and Other Stories in ebook and paperback—though I must warn you that Open Road Media is, at best, a second-rate publisher, and I seriously lament the fact that so many books by authors I love have fallen into their hands. Typos and weird formatting decisions abound, such as the fact that FOR NO REASON the scene breaks were removed in their series of Simak’s collected short fiction. Chapter breaks are still intact, but scene breaks, which are arguably more important? Gone. How shitty.

If you want (in my opinion) more reputable reprints, I would recommend the anthology The Hugo Winners, Volumes One and Two; it’s super-duper out of print, but since this tome seemed to get around a lot back in the ’70s, used copies are pretty easy to find without breaking the bank. You also get the rest of the short fiction Hugo winners between 1955 and 1970, so that’s a big plus. Another great option is The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Two B, the second half of (you guessed it) The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Two. Unlike the former anthology, this one is very much in print, and seems to have remained so since its initial publication.

Enhancing Image

This is a first contact story, and maybe one of the most upbeat of its kind, though Simak misdirects us at first into thinking it won’t be.

We follow Hiram Taine, a handyman and trader of “antiques” (in reality just old junky furniture he cleans up and sells at a hefty price), just your average rural Wisconsin dude. He has a dog named Towser and he likes to chat with another local man named Beasly, who’s apparently not very bright but who likes to hang out with Taine and help him with his work. Random, but I couldn’t help but notice the dog has the same name as the protagonist’s dog in Simak’s earlier story, “Desertion.” Is this supposed to mean anything? How many Simak stories have dogs named Towser?

Anyway, Taine is hired to fix a TV set owned by the Hortons, Henry and Abbie, with Henry being boss man at a local plant (a computer plant, apparently). The TV is old and, according to Taine anyway, replacing it would probably be cheaper than repairing it, but it comes with a radio and a record player, and Abbie won’t replace it. Taine and Beasly move the bulky TV into the basement when this happens:

“Well, Hiram,” she said, excited, “you put a ceiling in the basement. It looks a whole lot better.”

“Huh?” asked Taine.

“The ceiling. I said you put in a ceiling.”

Taine jerked his head up and what she said was true. There was a ceiling there, but he’d never put it in.

Taine has one of those unfinished basements—only now it’s a little less unfinished. Not only does his basement have a ceiling that he didn’t have installed, but it seems to be of a metallic substance, except it’s not any kind of metal Taine recognizes. Later that day, he tests the ceiling and finds that a drill won’t penetrate it, or even leave so much as a scratch. Well that’s weird. At this early point in the story, Taine notices some things are different about his house, and normally this would be played for suspense, which is kind of is—but, as I said, this is misdirection.

Indeed the first stretch of “The Big Front Yard” feels almost like a subversion of what would, even in 1958, sound like the set-up for a spooky alien invasion story. You know how superstitious people will sometimes say dogs can see ghosts or some goofy shit like that? Towser spends much of the story trying to find a woodchuck that doesn’t exist, but we’ll get back to that in the spoilers section. Clearly something has started living in or around the property, and it doesn’t stop with Taine’s basement getting refurbished. Several of the junky odds and ends have been mysteriously repaired, even improved in some cases; the big TV set Taine got for repairs is now not only fixed without his help, but it now also plays in color (remember, 1958). You and I know, even going into this, that aliens are involved, yet the surprising part is that rather than hint ominously at a future attack on humanity, these aliens seem, if anything, to be pretty benign, if not outright friendly.

What I like about a lot of Simak’s work, and what he does to an almost perfect degree here, is he refuses to bend to the Golden Age cliché of aliens being depicted as evil outsiders, along with the xenophobic implications; aliens rarely play the villains in Simak’s fiction, but then Simak’s fiction tends to be light on conventional villains. Taine is also not your typical Golden Age protagonist: he’s not a scientist or a politician, he’s not what you’d call a genius, and he’s by no means the physical encapsulation of what Campbell would’ve considered the “ideal” man. Like a lot of Simak protagonists, Taine is a hard-working (if not entirely honest) Midwesterner who’s just looking to make a buck. Honestly I scratch my head as to why Gold rejected “The Big Front Yard” and Campbell bought it; it feels like the roles should’ve been reversed.

Before long, Towser, in his efforts to find the woodchuck, finds something else right by the house, and digs furiously for it. Already aware that something definitely strange has been going on, Taine and Beasly dig up whatever Towser sniffed out, and what they find is indeed strange: a large oval-shaped contraption buried in the ground, made of a glassy metal that Taine knows he’s never seen before. Fear runs through his veins, but he also experiences what we might call a conceptual breakthrough—a discovery of something beyond known human limits that counteracts the fear with a sense of wonder. “A sense of wonder” is a really old and cliched phrase in SF, especially Golden Age SF, but I think there are a few moments in “The Big Front Yard” alone which do it justice.

And the conviction grew: Whatever it was that had come to live with him undoubtedly had arrived in this same contraptions. From space or time, he thought, and was astonished that he thought it, for he’d never thought such a thing before.

Life on other planets? You bet. What else could it be? Like any first contact story there is at least some uncertainty involved, but as is typical of Simak, there’s also a gentle whimsy and that aforementioned sense of wonder which gives us the impression that Taine, Beasly, and the others aren’t in any real danger, despite the mysteriousness of the situation. If our boys thought the repaired junk and the large glassy contraption were weird, though, they’re about to have the sight of their lives, after they’ve finished with the digging and come back around to the front of the house.

He and Beasly went up the gravel driveway in the dark to put the tools away in the garage and there was something funny going on, for there was no garage.

There was no garage and there was no front on the house and the driveway was cut off abruptly and there was nothing but the curving wall of what apparently had been the end of the garage.

The front of the house is folded in on itself. The back is still good, though! But yeah, uhh, how did this happen? Why? Taine’s scared, but now he’s also utterly baffled. Our boys enter through the back door, and… the front of the house is still there. From the inside. Except whereas it had been nighttime outside the house, now there’s daylight breaking through the front windows which are no longer there from the outside.

“The Big Front Yard” can be more or less split into two halves, those being before and after the front of the house gets miraculously folded. If the first half of the novella has almost a magic realism feel about it, it becomes something more akin to a planetary romance in the latter half. I won’t say too much in the spoiler section, since the plot becomes more straightforward at this point, but it also becomes even more charming and readable. The whole thing can be described as “cute,” which is not a word I would use with the vast majority of Golden Age SF (FYI, I do consider the “Golden Age” to be the ’50s, not the ’40s), but “The Big Front Yard” is just a happy-go-lucky tale which refuses to take itself overly seriously.

There Be Spoilers Here

The front of the house, from the inside, opens to a different planet—a vast desert landscape with a sun different from ours. The front of Taine’s house, including his car and driveway, has been transported to this new world, in a way, and conversely the back of the house is now folded on itself. This is where we meet the aliens who have apparently taken up residence on Taine’s property: little ratlike creatures with humanoid-ish faces. These aliens pay Taine no mind and simply keep walking in a single file line through the desert. There’s also… du-dum… another house which serves the same function as Taine’s, except this one appears deserted, serving as a gateway between the desert world and a third world, this one being more jungle-like. Taine’s house seems to have become part of a network of houses which serve as portals for other worlds.

This was another world—there could be no doubt of that—another planet circling another star, and where it was in actual space no one on Earth could have the least idea. And yet, through some machination of those sixteen things walking straight in line, it also was lying just outside the front door of his house.

Soon we run into a different alien race, one which is decidedly more humanoid in appearance; these guys ride on what appear to be horseless saddles, though our boys gather that the humanoid aliens use some kind of anti-gravity device. Far more unfortunately, we also have to deal with the US government putting their filthy hands in things. It was a cliché, even at the time, for the government to get involved with ayy lmao affairs, though Simak’s irreverence for the soldiers and bureaucrats here is somewhat refreshing; they’re the closest thing the story has to villains, and while they are somewhat of the mustache-twirling variety, they’re not too harmful. Really the most tense thing to happen in the whole story is when Taine loses Towser in the desert world for a bit, but it’s okay, he finds him. Towser is such a good boy; there should be a Hugo for Best Dog.

What do these aliens want, though? And what will it take for the government to not take possession of Taine’s house? The solution ends up being a mighty convenient one: Beasly, while not being the sharpest tool in the shed, is able to communicate with the aliens, and as it turns out, the aliens are looking to start a trading relationship with mankind, as part of a network of interplanetary traders. Rather than wanting to trade top-secret info on weapons, the aliens want more practical things, like the very concept of paint, which is somehow foreign to them. The big twist of “The Big Front Yard” is that Beasly is telepathic; that’s right, he can communicate with others using his mind—even Towser, who’s a dog, and even the aliens, who are… aliens.

Suddenly I can see why Campbell would’ve liked this.

I do find this twist to be the least convincing part of the story. You could say it’s far-fetched that Taine is able to walk and breathe fine on an alien planet without any technological assistance, but I would also say you’re a killjoy who probably had a really boring childhood. I guess my problem is that the telepathy thing, even if it’s used to hand-wave communications between humans and the saddle-riding aliens (which it is), doesn’t cover for the fact that our languages would be completely different. That and while I feel like Towser sensing the aliens, including a giant woodchuck-looking alien, was foreshadowed well enough, I find Beasly’s secret power to be less convincing. People were just really into ESP at this time, huh?

Even so, all is well. The aliens want to become trading partners with mankind, with Taine as mankind’s ambassador and Beasly as his interpreter. The government will keep off their backs, at least for the time being, and anyhow, in the meantime they can learn some pretty valuable things from the aliens. It all looks like the beginning of a beautiful business relationship.

A Step Farther Out

Clifford D. Simak would win two more Hugos, and was the third person to be given the Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (after Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson). Despite this immense honor, Simak now stands as a somewhat obscure figure (not unlike Williamson, actually), and I see that as a big shame, because his work has certainly aged better than a lot of Heinlein’s. Heinlein is one of my all-time favorite authors, maybe top five material, but he can be pretty embarrassing when he doesn’t have his eye on the prize. Simak, meanwhile, continued to produce respectable work well into the ’70s, after many of his contemporaries had either died, retired, or pulled a Heinlein.

Simak would win his third Hugo in 1981, and he would remain active until just a couple years before his death in 1988. The world of SF, and even genre fiction at large, would surely be worse off without him.

“The Big Front Yard” may not be Simak’s best story, but it might be the best example of what made Simak different from so many other SF authors in the ’40s and ’50s. While there is a bit of light misogyny with Abbie Horton’s characterization (she’s described as “bossy” at one point), it’s otherwise remarkably devoid of racism and jingoism. I also get the impression, just from reading this, that Simak was probably horrified and disgusted by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; indeed his fix-up “novel” City partly feels like a cry against atrocities (be they Allied or Axis) committed during World War II. It would’ve been easy to initiate the partnership between mankind and the saddle-riding aliens for the purposes of exchanging weapons of mass destruction, but Simak did not seem keen on putting such an option on the table.

There’s a tenderness running through much of Simak’s fiction; you could say it’s an aversion to violence, and if Simak has any big weakness it’s that maybe he can be too much of a softy—a criticism one could aim at few, if any other Golden Age authors, I can assure you. “The Big Front Yard” has been held as a classic for decades, and while some classics of the field keep that title more for historical importance than enjoyability, this is a classic whose value very much persists. It’s a damn fine story, regardless of age.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Bears Discover Fire” by Terry Bisson

August 3rd, 2022

(Cover by Wayne Barlowe. Asimov’s, August 1990.)

Who Goes There?

Despite having read this story multiple times over the years, my experience with Terry Bisson remains minimal, which is not to say he hasn’t written much. Bisson began his SFF career in earnest in the ’80s, and unlike most authors he started out as a novelist before dipping his toes in short fiction; he already had a few novels to his credit by the time “Bears Discover Fire” was published. You may also recognize him as the man who finished Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman on Walter M. Miller Jr.’s behalf, after the latter had committed suicide.

Bisson turned 80 this year.

“Bears Discover Fire” has to be one of the most decorated short stories in SFF history. Where do I even start? It won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Story. It also placed #1 in the 1991 Asimov’s Short Story poll. Really the only major award this thing didn’t win was the World Fantasy, and I have to assume it was a close call.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1990 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which can found on the Archive here. If you want a slightly more “legitimate” method then know that it’s also been reprinted digitally in Lightspeed Magazine. Even if we’re to ignore those, “Bears Discover Fire” is one of the most reprinted SFF tales of the past few decades, and you won’t struggle to find it in some anthology, not least of these being Gardner Dozois’s The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction and Orson Scott Card’s Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century. You have no excuse is what I’m saying.

This is the kind of story that could’ve easily have been published in F&SF, and even half a decade earlier it probably would’ve been, but for better or worse, Dozois had a very loose definition of “science fiction.”

Enhancing Image

A man, his brother, and the brother’s son stop just off the highway when they catch a flat. Bobby, Wallace, and Wallace Jr. For the longest time I thought of the narrator as being nameless, but Wallace Jr. calls him “Uncle Bobby” at one point, so what do I know. Anyway, Bobby is really good with cars, and he gives Wallace Jr. a flashflight before replacing the flat tire. The flashlight keeps going dead (one of those things where you have to keep shaking the battery), but Bobby’s able to get the job done. There is just one problem, though: not all the light is coming from the flashlight.

Our characters find some local bears, which is strange in itself because apparently there are few bears in Kentucky, but what’s stranger is that these bears are carrying torches. Now, given the premise of bears becoming intelligent enough to use fire, this sounds like it may turn into a horror story—only it’s not. Something I’ve appreciated about this story with each reread is the dry humor which borders on the absurd. Take the ending of this opening scene for instance, which, rather than having a melodramatic moment of revelation about the bears, has this:

Opening three doors at once, we got into the car and drove off. Wallace was the first to speak. “Looks like bears have discovered fire,” he said.

So bears have discovered fire. Not just in Kentucky but in several other states, perhaps not coincidentally all Southern states—with the exception of Illinois, although Bobby notes it specifically happening in southern Illinois. Bears have begun making bonfires near the highways, but aside from that they’re not doing much that’s unusual for a bear, other than the fact that they’re not going into hibernation once winter approaches.

To this day I’ve not encountered many uniquely Southern works of SFF. A lot from the Northeastern region, of course, and a good deal from the Midwest, but things get more scarce once we get near the Southeast. But then how much regional SFF is there anyway. Regardless, “Bears Discover Fire” is definitely a Southern SFF story, complete with Wallace Jr. knowing how to use a gun despite being in his teens yet. I would also say this is pastoral, and I guess it is, except that this not a story that exactly yearns for pastoralism; maybe not a yearning, but a passing of the torch between old and new, or maybe rural and urban.

More important than Wallace (who basically disappears early on), we get Wallace and Bobby’s mother, who’s very old, to the point of being kept in a nursing home. An aside, but nursing homes may be the most depressing places humans have ever conceived. A day in prison will not break your spirit like a day in an old folks’ home. The mother is pretty funny. There’s a gentle cynicism that permeates the narrative, from the mother’s hungering for death to Wallace not only being a minister at what sounds like one of those made-up Protestant churches (“House of the Righteous Way, Reformed,” it’s called) but making most of his money through real estate.

Once again, the bears discovering fire sounds like it could lead to horrific consequences for the humans, but any damage we hear about is played for laughs. Consider this little episode, while Bobby and Wallace Jr. are at the nursing home and watching TV:

The TV interviewed a hunter and his wife whose $117,500 Shenandoah Valley home had burned. She blamed the bears. He didn’t blame the bears, but he was suing for compensation from the state since he had a valid hunting license. The state hunting commissioner came on and said that possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (enjoin, I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back. I thought that was a pretty liberal view for a state commissioner. Of course, he had a vested interest in not paying off.

Bobby’s a pretty chill guy about all of it.

What makes Bobby work so well as the narrator is that he’s not someone who’s trying to be funny. A problem often encountered with first-person narrators is either they try too hard to be funny/endearing, and end up as obnoxious, or they serve such a distanced perspective that a third-person narrator would have done just as well or better. But Bobby is an unassuming fellow, and he does have a stake in the matter; he becomes curious, in his own way, about the bears, and because Wallace is away with his wife on some business trip, he takes Wallace Jr. with him for the ride.

There Be Spoilers Here

You may be wondering something. “How did the bears get like this?” We get an implied explanation, but it’s not confirmed, which is just as well, and it does after all serve a symbolic purpose:

Another scientist said the bears were attracted by the berries on a new bush that grew only in the medians of the interstates. He claimed this berry was the first new species in recent history, brought about by the mixing of seeds along the highway. He ate one on TV, making a face, and called it a “newberry.”

The so-called newberries are, according to Bobby, so sweet as to be sour. A human could theoretically eat a newberry, but it has simply too strong a taste.

Unless you’re a bear.

The bears love the newberries. Does it have anything to do with their increased intelligence? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just something nice for them to eat that happens to grow near highways. Another token of the new, urbanized South, yet not necessarily a bad thing.

One day Bobby gets a call from the nursing home and thinks at first that his mother has finally passed away, but this turns out to not be the case. No, it turns out that his mother has escaped, taking her beloved tobacco and a bedspread with her. It doesn’t take long for Bobby to get an idea as to where his mother could have gone.

When Bobby and Wallace Jr. find the old woman, she’s sitting with a bunch of bears, at a bonfire of their making. At first Bobby and the kid are nervous with the bears, but find that they’re not aggressive; indeed there seems to be a bit of humanness about the bears now—how they sit around the fire and stare into it, passing around a hubcap filled with newberries. They’re like a bunch of people, some friends, some family, maybe a few strangers, camping around a fire on a cool night.

Maybe a new human race is emerging.

The climax of “Bears Discover Fire” is deeply bittersweet. I remember doing a live reading of it with a good friend of mine some months ago, and the ending made him tear up a bit. Just a little bit. Even on a fifth (or maybe tenth) reading, I still find the mother’s death while among the bears to be powerful in an unspeakable way. Bisson defies our expectations one last time by having the mother die in the most peaceful way possible, surrounded by her son and grandson, the bears simply minding their own business. There’s even a bit of humor during this final scene with Bobby and his mom that doesn’t intrude on the sadness.

I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased.

She dies holding his hand, and that’s that.

The morning comes, and Wallace shows up with a couple state troopers backing him. His overnight stay with the bears has changed Bobby in almost a metaphysical way, one of those classic SF moments where a door has been opened. Bobby describes the state troopers in dehumanizing terms, or rather he describes them as being no more human than the bears with how stoic and seemingly isolated they act.

At the very end Bobby tries eating a newberry again, but he can’t do it; it’s a thing meant for bears, not people.

A Step Farther Out

“Bears Discover Fire” is the kind of short story you can easily teach in an English lit class, outside the confines of genre. Is it science fiction? Is it fantasy? It’s been anthologized as belonging to either, but I personally think of it as a speculative fable. It’s short, about a dozen pages (Lightspeed weighs it in at only 4,701 words), and you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time much even if, God forbid, you end up not liking it. What helps, of course, is that Bisson’s hand is sure and light, a prose style that’s not poetic per se but which nonetheless is rich in detail, from Bobby’s observations to everyday life of modern Kentucky.

I like “Bears Discover Fire” a lot, big surprise; it’s been a favorite of mine for the past few years, and I always go back to it when re-reading anthologies (which, ultimately, I tend to only re-read certain stories from anyway). It seemed like a good first pick for this site, as it’s pretty well-known, pretty easy to find, and it’s classroom discussion fodder without being overbearing—what with all the obvious but not obnoxious symbolism. Picking up the issue of Asimov’s it originally appeared in and re-reading it thoroughly once more, I’m struck by its gentle beauty and its soft-spoken sense of humor. I don’t laugh out loud exactly, but I always chuckle, and I always feel like I’m being transported to west Kentucky in the late ’80s, despite being solidly a Jersey boy.

I’m also reminded of Clifford D. Simak, who we’ll get to pretty soon. But whereas Simak clearly prefers the rural Midwestern utopia he remembers (or thinks he remembers) from his childhood over modernity, Bisson’s viewpoint seems more nuanced—at least in the case of the one story of his I vividly remember reading. The bears, as a sign of modernity, are taken not as good or bad, but simply as new things in a new era. An era of around-the-clock news and advertising which has its ups and downs.

Well, in a few days we’ll be tackling the first part of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, and after that we have Simak’s Hugo-winning novella “The Big Front Yard.” Hopefully you’ll look up a scan, or a book reprint of your choice, and read along with me. I’ll see you then.

I miss you already.
Things Beyond: August 2022

August 1st, 2022
(Cover by Hubert Rogers. Astounding, February 1940.)

Picking stories to review can be pretty hard. Imagine simply reading fiction in your free time: novels, short stories, whatever. There are so many things you want to get to, things you’ve heard good things about, things you’ve been meaning to reread (because rereading is important), and yet there are only so many hours in the day.

Now I must, for August, limit myself to writing about three short stories, two novel serials, and two novellas. And not just anything; these will be the first to charge into battle, the first guinea pigs for me to test on and see what this site will be all about. The stories that will help me find my footing the most.

As such, all the stories this month will at least be Hugo nominees, if not winners—with one exception, and even then it’s by a two-time Hugo winner. Speaking of which, we have, for the serials:
1. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Published in three parts in Galaxy Science Fiction, January to March 1952, and it would win the very first Hugo for Best Novel. I’m fond of Bester’s short fiction, and The Stars My Destination is still a delightfully hardboiled and experimental novel. Alas, I’ve yet to read The Demolished Man, his debut novel, but that’ll change pretty soon.
2. If This Goes On— by Robert Heinlein, published in two parts in Astounding Science Fiction, February to March 1940. An early and defining work by one of my absolute favorite authors, though I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read it before. It would win the Retro Hugo for Best Novella. I know, it’s technically a novella, but hey, if it’s serialized, it gets a serialized review.
Now for the novellas. I must confess, dear reader, I have a huge soft spot for novellas, especially when it comes to SFF. Hell, SFF is the only field of literature nowadays where novellas still get written and published regularly. Still, two novellas for this month. I had to choose wisely. Here they are:
1. “The Big Front Yard” by Clifford D. Simak. Astounding Science Fiction, October 1958. Winner of the 1959 Hugo for Best Novelette (the Best Novella category didn’t exist yet). Aside from his Hugo-winning novel Way Station this is probably the quintessential Simak story, so we’ll be giving it a deep dive and see how Simak works his magic.
2. “The Lineman” by Walter M. Miller Jr. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1957. You may know Miller as the author of A Canticle for Leibowitz, but did you know that he also wrote… OTHER STUFF? He even won another Hugo with “The Darfstellar,” but I’m more interested in checking out this one.
Finally, we have the short stories for this month. Two of these are rereads (one I’ve reread more times than I can count), but as you know, rereading is important. And the one I haven’t read before has me very curious. This month’s short stories are:
1. “Bears Discover Fire” by Terry Bission. Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1990. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, God knows what else, and I’ve read it about as many times as it’s been reprinted—which is a lot. A fine choice for the inaugural short story.
2. “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” by Rebecca Roanhorse. Apex Magazine, August 2017. Hugo and Nebula winner. This will be my first time reading this short story, and by extension anything by Roanhorse. Very excited about it.
3. “With Morning Comes Mistfall” by George R. R. Martin. Analog Science Fiction, May 1973. Hugo and Nebula nominee. Martin is one of the most famous fantasy authors ever, but readers will be less familiar and thus pleasantly surprised with his SF.
I’ll be linking to the source magazine issues when available/convenient. I want my readers (all five of you) to be able to read these stories without going through much hassle, and besides, you get to discover or rediscover some stuff that’s really worth reading. I won’t always be able to provide a digital zine link—occasionally I’ll have to track down used print copies, like some kind of literary raccoon.

Won’t you read with me?