Tag: ed emshwiller

The Observatory: “Flowers for Algernon” and Inventing the Human in Science Fiction

May 15th, 2023

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, April 1959.)

Contains spoilers for “Flowers for Algernon,” a story that’s over half a century old and which a lot of people have read already.

Act III Scene 1 of Hamlet has what must be the most famous soliloquy in the English language, although it’s so lengthy that only teachers and trained actors can recite all of it; but that doesn’t matter because anyone who’s had at least a high school English education knows parts of it. You know the one. “To be or not to be…” We’re about knee-deep in the play at this point; there’s no going back. Hamlet has already gotten word from his ghost dad (whose presence we’re supposed to take at face value) that his uncle Claudius had indeed murdered Hamlet’s father and taken his place on the throne deliberately. This is not long before the play-within-a-play that serves as Hamlet‘s third-act climactic event. Really there should be no reason for this play to be longer than three acts, but Shakespeare is gonna keep us seated for much, much longer. As we all know, Hamlet may be the slowest avenger in the history of English fiction; he really TAKES HIS TIME.

And yet where would we be without that soliloquy? The strange part is that from a strictly plot-relevant standpoint there’s no reason for it to be in the play: Hamlet contemplates suicide and ultimately chooses to keep going. Why stop like this? Actually there are a lot of soliloquys and conversations in Hamlet that do nothing to push the plot forward, but “To be or not to be…” is the most famous example; more importantly, it offers a key to figuring out what the hell all this is about. Rereading it, I’m inclined to quote a specific passage here, which has to do with today’s topic. And why not? It’s such a wonderful bit of poetry. Get this:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. […]

Hamlet would avenge his father sooner if he wasn’t so burdened with conscience. The very ability to contemplate his actions, to such an extent that he struggles to act. Hamlet’s chief flaw, as we understand it, is that he dooms about half the cast by acting either too late or not at all; and when he does put his foot down it’s pretty much always for the worse. Action is the enemy. Or is it thought? You may not know this, but it’s pretty hard to convey a character’s thoughts, divorced from their actions, on the stage. Theatre is not a medium that naturally lends itself to introspection; if a character thinks about something they have to say so out loud—quite loud, for the sake of the people in the back row. Shakespeare also knew that people think basically nonstop, even if it’s about the most banal nonsense, hence why Hamlet, a famously introspective character whose every thought pours from his maw, has easily the most lines of any Shakespeare character.

Yet there’s nothing more human: the burden of conscience.

Shakespeare wrote Hamlet for the stage, but the chances of it being meant to be performed in its entirety are not high. Only the foolhardy try to perform Hamlet unabridged, with Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation being more of a gimmick than an act of faithfulness to the text. Wow, all four exhausting hours! At the same time it’s much more digestible if read to oneself, with the ideal cast being a single performer: the reader. Even its length supports this notion that we’re supposed to wallow in Hamlet’s flawed humanity by ourselves, in our mind’s voice, which you have to admit is remarkable. Aside from being a natural-born poet, Shakespeare did something that was probably thought to be impossible for the stage, in how he explored the zones and textures of human thought. Many people wrotes plots like Shakespeare, and even better than Shakespeare (the man borrowed quite a few of his plots and even then he wasn’t an inventive plotter with his “original” stories), but the characters are something else.

Despite being first performed circa 1600, we would not see the heights of human consciousness in Hamlet even remotely reached in magazine SF in the genre’s early days. Even when John W. Campbell came along, with his preoccupation with the potential of the human mind (yadda yadda psi powers yadda yadda), there was still a conspicuous lack of writing about human thought as opposed to action. Consider this: the typical Campbellian SF story is a problem story. There’s a problem, due to technology or human error or something else, and the (it’s always human) protagonists must find a material, practical solution. A cult manifests among conveyer belt workers in Robert Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll” and this problem must be solved practically. Two spacefaring races meet unexpectedly in Murray Leinster’s “First Contact” and they must find a way to avoid blowing each other to smithereens. Isaac Asimov’s robot stories are largely concerned with testing the Three Laws of robotics. In Fredric Brown’s “Arena,” a human and an alien warrior must battle to death for the fate of humanity.

A common criticism of so-called Golden Age SF I’ve seen from people my age (i.e., in the 18-to-30 brackett) is that characters in these stories are almost always made of cardboard. The characters to serve a problem narrative, in which the author will demonstrate possible future tech or, more interestingly, moral dilemmas that may arise from future developments. These are stories that are fundamentally rooted in action, which is to say they exclude thought that does not contribute to propelling said action. The logical conclusion of this school of genre storytelling comes in the form of Hal Clement—who, make no mistake, is quite good at what he does. Clement characters are, at their core, totally sane, reasonable people who, if we’re given a window into their thought processes, will generally only consider problems and solutions. Probably why a lot of people bounce off Clement: his “human” characters are little more than abstractions. Not very Shakespearean!

Sure, the best of these stories are memorable and entertaining, but thre’s also not a warm human heart beating at their cores—with exceptions. Even then, with the rise of Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the ’50s, presenting a more liberal and humane side to SF, stories published in the magazines were still, at least without the shackles of Campbell this time, problem narratives that fed on action. You won’t exactly see the SF equivalent of a John Cheever story in Galaxy. There are examples sprinkled here and there, but we would have to wait until 1959 to witness what would, up to that point, be the single finest example of thought-driven—character-driven—science fiction, and that’s the short story version of “Flowers for Algernon,” in the April 1959 issue of F&SF. Daniel Keyes had originally written “Flowers for Algernon” for H. L. Gold over at Galaxy, but after Keyes refused to give the story a happy ending, Gold turned it down—in what has to be one of the biggest editorial mistakes in magazine SF history. Robert P. Mills of F&SF then picked it up and it won a Hugo.

There are a few stories I’ve read several times before that I refuse to cover for this site in a review, and “Flowers for Algernon” is one of them. What more can I say about it? Only that it’s one of the most perfectly crafted and emotionally resonant works of modern fiction, inside or outside of the genre, and that its lasting popularity is a testament to its humanity. I could give a couple gripes that don’t really mean anything—namely that the science-fictional aspect is clearly implausible and that our understanding of people with mental disabilities has grown considerably since the time of Keyes writing the short story; but really, I’d be wasting my time. Both the short story and novel are award winners and undying classics in the field, with the novel alone selling over 5 million copies with no sign of its star power waning; it’s even been enshrined with a Library of America edition. Most “classics” in the field don’t get this treatment.

We all know the basic “plot,” with Charlie Gordon, a mentally disabled man who consents to partake in an experiment that may revolutionize the capacity for human thought—the other test subject being the white lab mouse Algernon, who himself has become abnormally intelligent due to the treatment. Charlie’s own arc is pretty much a full circle, with him starting as a man of below-average intelligence who gradually soars to intellectual heights previously only dreamt of—only to plummet to Earth in the end when the treatment reverses itself. One man gains and then loses his immense capacity to think, and this in itself is the tragedy. The world is not in danger. No significant portion of the human race is in danger. There is no grand “problem” to be solved. Charlie tries to make good with his time but at some point he realizes there really is nothing to be done about averting his fate. All he can do is think, and ya know, try not to ruin the relationships he’s formed with some people in the meantime.

“Flowers for Algernon” (I’m using quotation marks because I’m primarily referring to the short story version) does not give us a complicated narrative; there’s a reason it works as both a short story and a 300-page novel. Stuff happens, but there is surprisingly little action. Charlie does not do a whole lot, especially in the short story version. The story’s maleability with its plot beats is intentional—as is a journal being used to frame everything. There’s nothing more personal, more given to introspection, than someone’s journal/diary, on top of the inherent intimacy of a first-person narrative. “Flowers for Algernon” would not work so well, nor would we be able to relate to Charlie so much, if it was all told with bird’s-eye-view third-person narration; we can’t afford to be that detached from what we’re reading. Charlie Gordon would not be one of the most beloved protagonists in SF history if we weren’t able to read his every written hope and dream—and nightmare. This was it: character-driven SF.

Not that Keyes has Shakespeare’s knack for the language (I’m not sure who does), but he does tap into the same source that the bard’s most rounded characters came from. It wasn’t the very first example, but “Flowers for Algernon” became a phenomenon damn near overnight in no small part because it gave genre readers something in so perfectly crystalized a form that they previously may have only found in the most psychologically adept of “literary” fiction: a human character who feels human. We get a character who is not constantly on the move, but someone who often stops and thinks about where he is and why he’s here. When Algernon dies near the end, we feel sad because Algernon is a cute little mouse who never did anything wrong, but we also empathize with Charlie and his grief—which would not hit us with such force if Charlie was a Campbellian protagonist, someone who was not burdened with conscience.

In her review of the novel (June 1966, F&SF), Judith Merril says the following, as she sums up the story’s appeal so well:

The impact of the original story rested primarily in the author’s extraordinary—perhaps unique—success in conveying an identifiable-and-identifiable-with subjective portrait of a subnormal intelligence. Charlie Gordon was a moron, and he was also a man; the reader could accept him as a fellow-human, share his fears and hopes and desperate needs. ([Theodore] Sturgeon has occasionally come close to accomplishing the same thing for me, but never so completely; offhand, I cannot think of another writer who has even come near it.)

Indeed Sturgeon was arguably the closest precursor to what Keyes tried with “Flowers for Algernon,” but, much as I also love Sturgeon, none of his characters (at least in his short fiction) are as deeply drawn as Charlie Gordon; and of course the Sturgeon who wrote “Microcosmic God” kept more in line with Campbellian logic than the Sturgeon who wrote “The Other Celia” and “A Saucer of Loneliness.” Keyes, who apparently had said all he wanted to say within the confines of science fiction, wrote very little SF following his masterpiece—not a full stop like what happened with Walter M. Miller in the wake of A Canticle for Leibowitz, but the effect was more or less the same. Keyes’s importance to the field rests on one short story and its novel expansion, but these set a new standard for SF storytelling that we’ve been taking for granted ever since. We still have big-picture extravaganzas that bet their money on a Sense of Wonder™, but these have been exceptions rather than the rule in recent years.

Now it’s hard to accept science fiction that’s anything less than human.

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The Observatory: Was 1953 the Best Year in SF History?

January 15th, 2023

(Childhood’s End. Cover by Richard Powers. Ballantine Books, 1953.)

Are we halfway through the first month of the year already? Aw geez, that means I gotta write something. I always have a few editorial ideas swimming around, but the question is always: When should I write these? A topic can be timeless, or it could benefit from being discussed at just the right moment. The right person in the right place can make all the difference, and the same goes for articles, even ones I’m not getting paid for. It’s January 15, 2023, which means two things: it’s a Sunday, and it’s also Robert Silverberg’s 88th birthday. Hopefully we can get a dozen more out of him.

I don’t consider myself a big Silverberg fan, at least not yet, but I do see his place as a constant in SF history as indispensable. I can’t think of anyone alive now aside from maybe Samuel R. Delany whom I would like to sit down with and interview for an hour more than Silverberg, for the simple reason that Silverberg has a nigh-endless supply of stories to tell—not stories as in fiction, mind you, but life stories, stories within SF fandom, stories about all the times he got rejected by editors and, naturally, the subsequent acceptances. This is a man who traded words with John W. Campbell, Anthony Boucher, H. L. Gold, Frederik Pohl, Ben Bova, etc., and lived to tell the tale. This man has attended every Hugo ceremony since its inception in 1953, since he was just old enough to be able to attend the Hugos, and that alone would make his memory a precious thing to back up on some hypothetical external hard drive for people’s memories, which are essentially their beings anyway.

And speaking of 1953…

I have a lot of anthologies on my shelves. I’m young and amateur, but still I think I have a good number. One of those is Silverberg’s Science Fiction: 101, which is a curious mixture of fiction anthology, writing advice, and memoir. I don’t think it’s in print anymore, sadly, but I do recommend finding a copy, as, regardless of how one may feel about Silverberg as a person, the fiction selected is of quite a high standard—some certified classics with a few deeper cuts thrown into the equation. Something I couldn’t help but notice, though, even if Silverberg didn’t bring it up himself, is that focus on ’50s SF in the anthology, and more specifically on a certain year. Of the thirteen stories included, five are from 1953, which one might think to be a little much, especially given that there are only two stories from the ’40s (C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” and Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain”). Yet 1953 is undoubtedly framed as a Big Year™ for Silverberg, which makes sense; he was just then starting to write SF in earnest, having lurked around long enough as a fan and now readying to make his mark on the field.

Science Fiction: 101 shows off short SF that meant a lot to Silverberg personally, mostly stuff published during a period in his life when he was making the jump from fan to professional. The slant towards 1953, however, only hints at just how prolific and remarkably high in quality that year was for a lot of people active in the field then. On multiple fronts, the field was rolling ahead at full speed, with the growing accessibility of paperbacks meeting halfway with a magazine market which was at the very height of a bubble—a bubble that, mind you, was about to burst, but in the moment it was at a point of critical mass, which meant a diverse market for writers who otherwise might struggle to get published in Astounding or Galaxy. In the US along there were well over a dozen SF magazines active in ’53, including Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Future Science Fiction, Science Fiction Quarterly, Worlds of If, Universe Science Fiction, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Space Science Fiction, and frankly almost too many more to count. We would not see this saturated an SF magazine market again until, well, now, but I’ll come back to that at the end.

There was something for everyone. If you wanted “literary” thinking man’s SF then Galaxy and F&SF scratched that itch tremendously; if you’re stubborn and like to read macho SF about psi powers then Astounding has your back; if you’re into planetary romance and generally adventure SF then there are a few options; if you like certain authors but wish you could buy even more of what they’re selling, then good news, those authors have probably sold to more magazines than you existed. And of course, if you’re one of those few sad fantasy readers in that weird point in time that’s post-Chronicles of Narnia but pre-Lord of the Rings then you’ll be pleased to know there’s a new fantasy magazine on the market: Beyond Fantasy Fiction, helmed by Galaxy‘s own H. L. Gold. And if that’s not enough, especially if you’re an avid book reader, the paperback market for SF is opening up big time, and that door will only open wider.

1953 was a great year to be Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and quite a few others. Dick and Sheckley had debuted the previous year, but 1953 saw these one-man writing factories pull out all the stops; you could probably make a top 10 list of your favorite Robert Sheckley stories from 1953 alone. It was also the year that Arthur C. Clarke, who had appeared from time to time in the American market previously, made his first big splash with American readers here, not just with the publication of Childhood’s End but also a slew of short stories that are still highly regarded, the most famous being “The Nine Billion Names of God.” Poul Anderson, who had been active for some years but had not made much impact, invoked F&SF‘s first serial with Three Hearts and Three Lions, forcing editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas to backpedal on their “no serials” policy.

When it came time for Hugo voters back in 2004 to partake in the Retro Hugos, all the aforementioned authors got at least one nomination, not to mention others getting in as well. I understand that the Retro Hugos are a controversial topic (Worldcon doesn’t even do them anymore, at least for now), but I find the idea admirable, and at the very least we get some deep cuts that deserve to be rediscovered on top of the usual suspects. The “1954” Retro Hugos, covering the best stuff to come out of 1953, might have, across all its fiction categories, the strongest of any Retro Hugo lineup. You’re probably thinking, “Voters are biased, they always pick either already-famous works or minor works by famous authors,” and that is basically true. For one I’m pretty sure the people who gave Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” the Retro Hugo for Best Short Story were thinking about the justly famous Twilight Zone adaptation and had not actually read Knight’s story; if they did they would deem it as minor. I’m also pretty sure Ray Bradbury was not the best fan writer of 1938, just call it a hunch.

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, October 1953.)

What makes the 1954 Retro Hugos different, however, is that the shortlists (never mind the winners) for fiction, regardless of category, are all but unimpeachable. Let’s take Best Novel as an example, because this really is a golden set of nominees. We have Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, and the winner with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. While not my personal favorite, Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most famous novels in all of SF; people continue to read it, it’s still being discussed quite actively, and it’s even taught in schools; it’s a stone-cold classic of the field and its win is deserved. With that said, you could literally pick any of these other novels and you wouldn’t really be wrong to do so. The Caves of Steel is arguably Asimov’s single best novel; Childhood’s End is a career highlight for Clarke, not to mention one of his most influential; More Than Human sees Sturgeon in rare good form as a novelist; and even the most obscure of the bunch, Mission of Gravity (Clement is one of those authors begging to be rediscovered), is a foundational example of hard SF.

All killer, no filler. You can’t say that with the Best Novel shortlist for any other Retro Hugo year, either because of nominees that are justly forgotten or because of nominees that don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. Yet the near-uniform excellence of the nominees here, as the best of 1953, tells me that it was a very good year indeed. A lot of people were active in the field at the time, but just as importantly, a lot of those people were producing damn good work that still holds up. There was filler, and there was retrograde SF that would’ve been considered old-timey in fashion even in 1953, but there was also so much treasure from so many different voices that the sheer level of quantity and quality is hard to ignore. It was even a good time to be a lady author, what with women like C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Margaret St. Clair, Andre Norton, Judith Merril, and others who have been sadly forgotten producing good work; we would not see this many women contributing to SF again until at least the ’70s.

Now, I admit, I have a ’50s bias. When I started reading short SF in earnest some years ago I mostly stuck to the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, with that middle decade especially getting attention. I have a real soft spot for SF from the ’50s, but not because it’s idyllic or puritanical or old-fashioned—it’s because the SF of that period is often not any of those things. The first serial I reviewed for my site was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, a sleazy novel about cold-blooded murder, prostitution, incest, and generally the dark side of a world where telepaths are the top 1%. A little more intense than what you’d expect for a novel published in 1952, and yet when the inaugural Hugos were held the following year Bester’s novel was honored with the first Hugo for Best Novel. Clearly writers and readers alike (at least enough of them) were daring enough in 1953 to think that a novel about the aforementioned cold-blooded murder, prostitution, incest, etc., was not only welcomed in SF spaces but could be considered a great work of literature. People seventy years ago were not as naïve as we like to pretend.

But that was, after all, seventy years ago, and of course 1953 is not the best year in SF history; there really cannot be a “best year” for a genre lauded for its capacity to change and adapt over time. The best year for SF hopefully has not happened yet. Yet certainly 1953 is emblematic of a specific point in time for the genre’s history, a time when the magazine market was booming, book publishing was on the rise, and we even get a few major “sci-fi” films that would help determine the genre’s cinematic power for the coming decade; more specifically I’m thinking of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The War of the Worlds, by no means perfect movies but ones which set a standard for the genre on the silver screen. The variety of voices writing SF in 1953 would also not be outdone for many years, and if we’re talking about short SF alone, we would not see such diversity again until the current era, what with several online magazines publishing works by people who would not have been heard even in that wonderland of ’53, whether because of their race, sexual orientation, or political leanings.

The future should always look better, and if it doesn’t then we should try to make sure that it does. There’ve been think pieces and discussions recently about the need for utopian SF, and why not? SF writers aren’t supposed to predict the future, but it’s possible to offer a blueprint for how people might be able to make a world wherein future generations will want to live. First, however, you need SF that’s thriving with quality works by quality people, and you can’t have that if the market has narrowed, where only so many outlets can only take so many voices. I shudder to think of a time when short SF has been basically locked out of discussion by virtue of so few short stories being published, which is why it’s such a good thing that the market is doing very well right now, and why such a level of diversity that we now see is to be treasured. If 1953 for SF represents anything it’s the same thing that 2023 for SF ought to represent: the promise of a good future.
Novella Review: “Ship of Shadows” by Fritz Leiber

December 17th, 2022

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, July 1969.)

Who Goes There?

By 1969, Fritz Leiber had been in the game for thirty years (a long time, mind you), and yet unlike most of his contemporaries he had not started to rest on his laurels, or, even worse, embarrass himself in front of his peers. Isaac Asimov became known as a pop scientist, releasing the occasional short story but mostly spending his time on articles and science books. Robert Heinlein went silent after The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and when he returned he seemed to have lost his magic touch (imagine waiting four years for a new Heinlein novel and you get I Will Fear No Evil). Theodore Sturgeon was mostly not writing at this point, although he was gaining himself some major Trek cred and he would soon return to the magazines with fresh material. Clifford Simak was pumping out about one novel a year, but the late ’60s were not exactly peak years for him. Yet Leiber not only remained productive but played nicely with the New Wave kids, fitting in with authors a generation younger than him; even at this relatively late stage of his career he remained restless.

“Ship of Shadows” was written specially for Leiber’s F&SF tribute issue, and as should probably be expected of a special author tribute story it goes just a bit farther than the average Leiber yarn. Whereas Leiber tends to jump between SF, fantasy, and horror with his fiction, “Ship of Shadows” dabbles in all three genres, though it can ultimately be considered science fiction for reasons I’ll get to much later. On the one hand this is a perfect recipe for disaster, or at least a muddled story, but the hodgepodge of genres paid off, as it won the Hugo for Best Novella. It’s also a reread for me, but it’s been a couple years, and as it turns out I remembered even less of “Ship of Shadows” than I thought I did—which is not necessarily a mark against it!

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Incidentally this is one of those old F&SF issues I actually have a physical copy of, which is cool. Being a Hugo winner, “Ship of Shadows” has been reprinted quite a few times over the years, first in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970 (confusingly covering fiction from 1969), edited by Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim. Naturally it would also appear in The Hugo Winners, Volume Three; it was supposed to appear in the previous volume, but Isaac Asimov, by his own admission, had somehow forgotten to include it. We also have the Leiber collection Ship of Shadows, very creatively named no doubt. If you’re an avid collector then there’s Masters of Science Fiction: Fritz Leiber from Centipede Press, although I do wanna warn you that a copy of this pristine hardcover will run you in the hundreds of dollars. Sadly it looks like there aren’t any reprints in paperback or hardcover that are currently available new, but on the bright side you have a lot of second-hand options.

Enhancing Image

Spar is an elderly (or at the very least decrepit) member of Windrush, some kind of ship that may or may not be the world entire. It’s amazing that Spar is able to accomplish anything given that a) he’s half-blind, and b) he’s a raging alcoholic. Indeed we start with Spar nursing himself through a hangover, which compounds his already poor eyesight, but quickly things “improve” when he comes across a talking cat—yeah, a talking cat, and it’s not a hallucination. The cat, to be named Kim, is clearly intelligent, and while there are “witches” on the ship who have cats as their familiars, Kim seems to be acting on his own. The two bond and start a sort of business relationship, with Spar providing Kim with a home and Kim providing him a service as rat catcher. Meanwhile Spar works at the Bat Rack (I sense a Halloween theme going on here) as a bartender’s assistant; said bartender is Keeper (get it? like barkeep? but also his brother’s keeper…?), who gives Spar something to do while also trying to not have him waste away on booze.

Know how you shouldn’t get high on your own supply? Same goes for drink, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure Spar is an addict.

A few things to note about the Bat Rack and the people who frequent it. Much of the novella’s action happens in or around this bar, which gives the story a vaguely theatrical tingue, what with there being only a few locations of note. The characters also have tangled personal and professional relationships, and it might be easiest to understand them as if in the context of a film noir, and why not, the setting and the character archetypes fit the bill well enough. Spar is our nominal hero who, much like the typical film noir protagonist, is knee-deep in his vices, with Keeper as the straight man. Suzy is a barfly who has a bit of a maybe-maybe-not going on with Spar, being much less the femme fatale than the film noir protagonist single obligatory lady friend, if he even has one. There’s Kim, the humorous and callous sidekick who arguably functions as the id to Spar’s ego. Then there’s the Big Bad™ of the story (not a spoiler, trust me), Crown, who is all but said to be the local pimp, as well as a big deal at the Bat Rack.

Oh, and then there’s Doc—the sage.

Regardless of where we actually are, we’re almost certainly not on Earth; for one thing, the method of timekeeping in Windrush is different. “Workday, Loafday, Playday, Sleepday. Ten days make a terranth, twelve terranths make a sunth, twelve sunths make a starth, and so on, to the end of time,” so says Spar. There’s a four-day cycle, ten days in the equivalent of a week, and so on, although this doesn’t help with understanding the setting so much as it helps give the impression that the setting itself is not totally understandable. Not much is explained in at least the first half of “Ship of Shadows,” partly because Spar, being our POV character, doesn’t know a whole lot himself, but also partly because his ability to comprehend his surroundings is hampered by his blindness. While everything being described as a “blur” got repretitive for me, I get that there are only so many words you can use to convey the fuzziness and lack of depth of poor eyesight.

Windrush is a curious setting for what swerves between fantasy, horror, and SF, as the descriptions of the ship’s interior very much imply that the story, on the whole, falls into that last genre. What complicates matters is that aside from the “normal” people aboard Windrush, there are also apparently witches, vampires, and even zombies, although tellingly these creatures of the night are not confronted directly (unless I’m missing something); for example we hear a good deal about witches, but we never see a witch or see witchcraft performed. The closest we get to witchcraft is actually medical science, plain and simple, and nobody aside from Doc understands how modern (or I guess it’d be considered futuristic) medicine works. Doc, whom Spar comes to with hopes of restoring his eyesight and even giving him a new pair of teeth, is the real hero of the story if anything, but since he’s a supporting character we’re not always sure what he’s up to.

Doc, who is maybe not the oldest (although he would be up there) but certainly the wisest of the cast, is also seemingly the only one aware that there was life prior to the current dynamic in Windrush. More than anything he represents the standards of our civilization, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence either that Doc, being the only truly civilized man on a ship full of barbarians, has a little black bag that amounts to the story’s MacGuffin. Little black bag? A doctor’s bag that can do anything? Does this sound a little but like the equally sought-after MacGuffin of C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag”? Similarly there’s a tinge of pessimism about humanity’s future, and how Doc’s equipment is the ony thing keeping what’s left of humanity from teetering off a cliff. Take Doc’s response to Spar’s request for new eyes and teeth, which is as bitter as it is solemn:

After what seemed a long while, Doc said in a dreamy, sorrowful voice, “In the Old Days, that would have been easy. They’d perfected eye transplants. They could regenerate cranial nerves, and sometimes restore scanning power to an injured cerebrum. While transplanting tooth buds from a stillborn was intern’s play. But now… Oh, I might be able to do what you ask in an uncomfortable, antique, inorganic fashion, but…” He broke off on a note that spoke of the misery of life and the uselessness of all effort.

Leiber was not only aware of Kornbluth but was close contemporaries with him, although the two have starkly different worldviews. Doc’s little black bag, and generally the narrative of how it will take a select few “smart” people to prevent humanity from blowing itself up, are definitely in keeping with Kornbluth’s writing, but let’s not kid ourselves; this is merely paying homage to a fellow great writer, rather than pastiche. For the most part “Ship of Shadows” reads like Leiber—not exactly classic Leiber, as it is grimier and bloodier than his early ’50s standouts, but it has the theatrics, the inventiveness, and the sense of wit one can expect from him. Had Kornbluth not already been dead for a whole decade he may have written a New Wave piece not too dissimilar from “Ship of Shadows.” Just beware that this is Leiber in an unusually dark vein (though not without a snarky sense of humor) by his standards.

F&SF used to (I guess they still do it, but we’ve only gotten one of these since 2002) dedicate special issues to authors deemed important in the field, especially authors who have contributed immensely to F&SF, with Leiber of course being one of the authors to receive this treatment. The tribute story, written specially for the issue, tends to be a novella, though not always, and typically you can expect the author indulge in as many of their fetishes (in the non-sexual meaning of the word) as possible while also, ideally, delivering a fine read. Eventually I’ll review Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” which also won a Hugo, and that novella is, for good or ill depending on your biases, very Anderson-y; similarly “Ship of Shadows” is up there with the most Leiber-y of works, and as a result of that it’s a bit muddled but also highly entertaining. It also has the advantage of being, like much of Leiber’s best work, pretty compact all things considered; it’s a novella, sure, but only maybe 20,000 words in length, and Leiber gets a lot of mileage by the gallon with this one.

There Be Spoilers Here

The big twist of “Ship of Shadows” is that it’s a generation ship story. Now, that may sound rather niche, but the generation ship story was, at least for a time, a pretty crowded subgenre (if it can even be called a subgenre) of SF. If you’ve read, say, Heinlein’s “Universe” or Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop then you know there are certain tropes to expect here. The thing about generation ships is that they sound cool on paper but realistically would run into a number of problems that are likely to jeopardize the whole operation, of which I would say the big three are: 1. the passengers or the crew commit mutiny and overthrow the ones in charge, 2. enough time passes that, depending on the sophistication of the ship’s design, the passengers might even forget that they’re on a spaceship, and 3. some illness or virus breaks out that, once it spreads, nobody on the ship is able to stop it, so we’d be looking at death or something not quite as bad. “Ship of Shadows” manages to tick all three boxes, because Leiber is going one step beyond with this one.

Whatever crew seems to be left on Windrush is clearly in charge of shit anymore, I suspect because they’ve tried to isolate themselves from the mostly ill passengers. Speaking of which, the passengers have almost entirely succumbed to the Lethean rickettsia, known colloquially as Styx ricks, with Doc the only person onboard who has the equipment and the know-how to treat symptoms; why then Doc and Keeper, who are demonstrably more rational, should give the reigns to Spar at the end is beyond me, but apparently it’s due to Spar’s position as the closest the drama has to an innocent soul. Awkward and unearned sex scene (well, implied sex scene) with Suzy aside, of course.

The novella’s climax is pretty over the top, almost reaching the levels of Titus Andronicus with how gruesome it is, although it must be said it lacks the camp factor of that infamous play. Not only are Crown and Ensign Drake disposed of in bloody fashion, but Suzy, who up to this point has been the only sympathetic female character of any substance, gets it maybe the bloodiest of all; there’s being fridged, and then there’s being fed unceremoniously into a meat grinder. Given Leiber’s history of quasi-pacifism, and how violence is often treated in his fiction (i.e., as something to be avoided), the brutality of “Ship of Shadows” further reinforces this notion that Leiber is pulling out all the stops—for both good and bad. Mostly good, but I was reminded rather uncomfortably that “Ship of Shadows” is one of those Leiber stories where he unintentionally comes off as much more of a woman hater than he really was.

Qualms aside, the ending is still one of those classic eureka moments, typical yes but often satisfying in a generation ship story where the characters realize that the universe is unfathomably bigger than their metal coffin. No wonder then that the twist is what I remembered more than anything (aside from Kim and the generally ghoulish atmosphere) from my first reading. Leiber loves his Halloween shit and he knows how to do the monster mash. That the ghoulish apperitions seemingly haunting Windrush are human drug addicts is maybe a little anticlimactic, but as another entry in Leiber’s continuing interest in the nature of addiction (especially alcoholism, which the man himself was prone to) it makes sense allegorically.

A Step Farther Out

I have to admit I’m a sucker for stories set on ships. Not a fan of actually being on ships, but stories about ships? Aw hell yeah. No wonder I like Melville and Conrad. A ship is the perfect setting to invoke paranoia, loneliness, nightmarish visions, a sense of isolation, all this negative shit that would be bad for the characters but good for us as readers. “Ship of Shadows” starts out as murky, intentionally so what with Spar’s eyesight, almost masquerading as fantasy before revealing itself to be SF in the second half, unfortunately sort of petering out at the very end. What makes “Ship of Shadows” so memorable is that while it would not be surprising if someone in their thirties wrote it, it’s a good deal more surprising that Leiber was pushing sixty at the time. There’s a bit of New Wave, a bit of satirical fantasy in the Unknown tradition, and a bit of that trademark Leiber quirkiness; the only thing it’s seriously missing is his thing for chess. It’s also a contender for Leiber’s most violent story, although your mileage may vary with regards to his treatment of his female characters (admittedly more brutal than the norm for him). In 1969, thirty years into his career (almost to the month), he was still searching for new avenues.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: December 2022

December 1st, 2022
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, July 1969.)

It’s that special time of year, and I’m not just saying that because it’s Christmastime. Truth be told, I’m not crazy about Christmas; I certainly don’t go nuts over it like I do with Halloween—which is why my review roster for this month is not Christmas-themed. My birthday is also this month (it’s the 9th, if you’d like to know), but that’s not why I’m here. Some months thing will be totally normal, but then there are times like this. Oh, we still have the usual rotation, albeit with a little twist (in fact it’s a new department), which I’ll get to in a minute. The real twist is that this will be a single-author lineup, and the guest of honor is Fritz Leiber.

Fritz Leiber was born on Christmas Eve, 1910, and when he made his professional genre debut in 1939, he was about to mark a new era in fantasy writing—although people were not aware of this at the time. His most lasting achievement is the grand episodic narrative of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, one of fantasy’s most daring duos and a landmark in what is now called Sword and Sorcery (the same subgenre which contains Robert E. Howard’s Conan, among other things). Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are by no means his only contribution to the genre, and indeed his turf goes far beyond just fantasy. You know, I really like Leiber, but even with most of my favorite authors I would not dedicate a whole month to reviewing works of theirs; what makes Leiber different from most is his ability to dabble in basically everything, from fantasy to horror to science fiction. Across the half-century of his career, Leiber shfited from genre to genre, mood to mood, not being as easy to pin down as most of his contemporaries.

Since this is a bit of an unusual month for reviews, I decided to go an extra step and introduce another new department—albeit an irregular one. There aren’t too many of them, but there are in fact “complete” novels in the magazines, especially in the ’40s and ’50s. Or rather were, because magazines running novels was basically an attempt to keep paperbacks (which were gaining traction) from biting their heels, an attempt which ultimately and inevitably proved a failure. A lot of “complete” novels being run in magazineare also just novellas, but there are exceptions! Leiber’s 1950 novel You’re All Alone is one such exception, and while it is technically an abridged version of The Sinful Ones (long story), at 40,000 words it’s a bit too long to be comfortably called a novella, at least for my blog. I’ll explain how this new thing will work at the end.

So, we get two serials, two novellas, two short stories, and a complete novel in honoring this bastard. Not the last time I’ll be doing this single-author month deal, but obviously it’s something I’ll only do maybe once a year. But enough! It’s time to reveal what we’ll be reading.

The serials:
1. Destiny Times Three, first published in the March to April 1945 issues of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novel. Not one of Leiber’s more famous works, if the number of times it’s been reprinted says anything, but then it is quite a short novel—probably too short to sell on its own but also too long to be anthologized easily. One of Leiber’s earliest attempts at depicting alternate timelines, a premise that he would return to fruitfully much later.
2. Rime Isle, first published in the May to July 1977 issues of Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy. Never heard of Cosmos? Don’t worry, it only lasted four issues. Rime Isle is part of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, being a later entry, as well as one of Leiber’s final appearances in the magazines; thereafter he stuck to original anthologies. Whereas some other Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories are often cited, this is not one of them. I know basically nothing about it.
The novellas:
1. “Scylla’s Daughter,” from the May 1961 issue of Fantastic. The late ’50s saw a major revival for the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, which was not coincidental considering Fantastic‘s new editor, Cele Goldsmith, clearly sympathized with Leiber and wanted to buy what he was selling, with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser getting at least one story a year in that magazine until Goldsmith left. “Scylla’s Daughter” would later be expanded into The Swords of Lankhmar.
2. “Ship of Shadows,” from the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This is a special issue of F&SF, being one of its author tribute issues, with “Ship of Shadows” as the lead novella. Technically a reread, but it’s been long enough that I could use a refresher, and hell, I remember liking it quite a bit. Leiber stories tend to fall into SF, fantasy, or horror, but “Ship of Shadows” ticks all three boxes, and it won a Hugo while it was at it!
The short stories:
1. “The Hound,” from the November 1942 issue of Weird Tales. The first several years of Leiber’s career saw him dwell primarily in Weird Tales and Unknown, the top fantasy-horror magazines of the early ’40s. Not being the most comfortable with SF, Leiber distinguished himself at first as a young master of terror and the supernatural. “The Hound” is one such early horror effort from Leiber, and hey, it’s apparently a werewolf story, and I love me some werewolves.
2. “The Moon Is Green,” from the April 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. After being relatively inative in the late ’40s, Leiber came back strong early the next decade, and his return to the field coincided with those explosive first years of Galaxy, the new SF magazine on the market. Leiber became one of Galaxy‘s leading writers in the early ’50s, and “The Moon Is Green” is one of those Galaxy-Leiber tales to get adapted for the legendary X Minus One.
Now, finally, the complete novel:
1. You’re All Alone, from the July 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures. Apparently the magazine version is an earlier draft that Leiber had tried but failed to get published, since the fantasy market in the latter half of the ’40s was in the dumps, but luckily Fantastic Adventures, previously a second-rate pulp outlet, was under new management. Leiber would then “expand” the novel for book publication under the title The Sinful Ones, but from what I’ve heard the magazine version is better.
About how these complete novel reviews will work. My review schedule is on a rotation basis, switching between short stories, novellas, and serials; depending on how many days there are in a month I would cram in a third novella or short story. The way I have it figured is, if a month has 31 days, and if I’m set to review a novella on the 31st day, I’ll switch that would-be novella out for a complete novel. After all, I wanna save the biggest single review project for last, and I wanna give myself enough time to really digest the extra long material. The resulting review will itself of course be longer than average. Now, how do I separate a complete novel from a novella? How does one tell the difference, especially since magazines, while usually two-columned, have different type sizes and therefore some can pack more wordage into each page? Sometimes magazines give rough word counts, but much of this, admittedly, will come down to my own discretion.

Not making promises, but complete novel reviews will probably be the last department I add to my blog. This is a one-man show, ya know, and I do have a day job to contend with. Still, I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t out of passive, and you also know that I’m a compulsive reader. The more the merrier! Just hope I can do someone as great as Leiber justice with this.

Won’t you read with me?
Novella Review: “The Kragen” by Jack Vance

November 17th, 2022

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Fantastic, July 1964.)

Who Goes There?

Jack Vance is a contender for the most influential mid-20th century SFF writer that relatively few people have read. He debuted in 1945, and unusually for a writer of that period his science fiction tended to read like fantasy—his fantasy, because nobody at that point wrote fantasy quite like Vance did. His 1950 collection (it’s a collection, I don’t CARE if some people call it a novel) The Dying Earth presents an Earth so far in the future that magic has not only emerged but overtaken technology; it influenced, among other things, Dungeons & Dragons. He would win two Hugos and a Nebula for the novellas “The Dragon Masters” and “The Last Castle,” which, despite sounding like they’d be fantasy, are in fact science fiction. He won a third Hugo in 2010 (this man lived a long time), this time for Best Related Work, with his autobiography This Is Me, Jack Vance! Even in his works that are not fantasy at all, there always seems to be a sense of magic with Vance.

Something to keep in mind is that Vance wrote a lot over a long span of time, and he has quirks that people will either accept or reject. If you really need your SFF to be colloquial or down to earth then you will probably not like Vance; his penchant for the flamboyant and the baroque has blocked off many would-be Vance fans. I have to admit that I wasn’t into Vance for a while, and even not I can’t say I love his work, but I do respect it and often enjoy it. Surely there’s something to like about a guy who will write a short story, set it on a planet that he’ll never write about again, and not only grant that setting a novel’s worth of detail, but even include footnotes. Vance is clearly a fan of planet-building, and it’s a niche talent he’s quite adept at, as we’ll see with today’s novella.

Placing Coordinates

“The Kragen” was first published in the July 1964 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. A bit of a long story with this one. It’s not unusual for novellas to be expanded into novels, or to be made into sections of novels like they’re pieces in a jigsaw puzzle; in my experience the novella usually doesn’t benefit by being inflated to novel-length. “The Kragen” was expanded into the novel The Blue World in 1966, with the novel version getting nominated for a Nebula and being up for the Prometheus Hall of Fame a few times (makes sense). I just assumed that since the novel version is more well-known that “The Kragen” would be one of those novellas to get reprinted maybe once. Not quite! It was reprinted in Robert Silverberg Presents the Great SF Stories: 1964, edited by… you guessed it, Robert Silverberg (and also Martin H. Greenberg). It got a chapbook release from Subterranean Press, which is weird, like who asked for this? We have at least one in-print edition with the Vance collection Wild Thyme and Violets and Other Unpublished Works, in both paperback and as an ebook.

Enhancing Image

Much of this review will be spent on the world-building of “The Kragen,” rather than the plot, since the actual plot is pretty simple when viewed with a wide lens; I suppose it has to be. Vance has about sixty pages to not only introduce a whole world to us but to make it comprehensible, so while there are a few twists and turns, this is not one of his more complex narratives. Take it as an adventure story that theoretically could be just as easily fantasy as SF, if not for background details.

The unnamed world of the novella is entirely covered with water, which when you think about it is not so different from our world, which is only mostly water. Several generations ago (the dates aren’t clear) a ship crash-landed on the planet—apparently a ship full of criminals (though given their ability to procreate it must’ve been co-ed), and surprisingly the survivors did not all kill each other within a month; instead they found ways to survive and even prosper on the blue planet. This is impressive, not only because civilization managed to rebuild itself out of a bunch of scraps, but because it did so with some things that we take fore granted, such as electricity and even metal. There is a bit of metal that lies in some people’s possession, but it’s not enough to be used for much of anything, and anyway, nobody knows what to do with it.

Not the first or last time Vance did a lost colony narrative; he arguably did it better in his 1958 novella “The Miracle Workers,” in which survivors of a crashed ship eventually devolve into warring pseudo-medieval factions. In both stories the content could be construed as fantasy while the reasoning behind that content is undeniably science-fictional.

Society works on a caste system, although even at the beginning of the story the system is loosening up, with inter-caste marriage and what have you. In a bit of humor from Vance the castes are named after species of criminal, so you have the Incendiaries, the Swindlers, the Hoodwinks, and so on, with Advertisermen at the bottom. I know, very funny. Hoodwinks actually don’t do what you would expect, as their job is basically to act as signal-men, communicating with people on other floats in a sort of morse code, quite literally winking hoods at the tops of towers. I’m not sure what Swindlers do here, since their occupation probably wouldn’t align with what their name implies. Anyway, the protagonist, Sklar Hast, is one such signal-man, although he spends much more time in-story being a thorn in some authorities’ sides than doing his job.

About those “floats.” Without metal, without even glass, society has to rely on other resources, and in this case they were very lucky, because while the ocean does indeed stretch from pole to pole, there are these vast swaths of sea-plant that are big enough to not only serve as pseudo-land but to be handy for lots of other purposes too. Whatever the plants don’t cover, human bones will sometimes do the trick; apparently the people of this seafaring society are not one to waste the bodies of their dead, though from what I can tell they don’t indulge in cannibalism. I wonder Donald Kingsbury read this (or more likely The Blue World), got to the part where a human rib is used as a hook, and thought, “Hmm, I could write a novel like this.”

Despite the lack of resources, life has been mostly good for Sklar Hast and his people. “On this water-world, which had no name, there were no seasons, no tides, no storms, no change, very little anxiety regarding time.” It’s one thing to have a single-biome planet, but it’s an extra strain on one’s suspension of disbelief that there be practically no harsh weather. Of course, had there been gales and hurricanes then the crash survivors surely would’ve died off, and thus we wouldn’t have a story. You gotta do what you gotta do. There are a few other things, which I’ll get to in the spoilers section, that don’t strike me as the most credible, but Vance (as usual) goes the distance with the mechanics of his newfangled world. A lot of time is spent on what the people of the floats eat and how they eat it, and stuff like that, and much of it is at least intriguing.

But wait, there’s trouble in paradise! The people do have one natural threat to their way of life: the kragen (plural), a race of sea monsters that act more as really large pests than as direct threats to human life. Still, an angry kragen has the bulk and weaponry (tentacles and mandibles) to fuck up a person, and unfortunately the people don’t have weaponry good enough to take on the kragen; instead they have to rely on the supposed goodwill of the largest kragen of them all, King Kragen, which the elders “””allegedly””” are able to communicate with. If King Kragen is appeased with gifts (i.e., food) then he’ll kill or drive off smaller kragen. This feels like solving a big problem with an even bigger problem, but who am I to judge.

A little aside…

We get illustrations of the kragen on both the issue’s cover and with the opening interior illustrations, both done by Ed Emshwiller. Now, Emshwiller is a legend, and I respect him, but while I would say his depictions of the kragen are accurate enough, they seem a little… goofy.

It’s not his best work is what I’m saying.

One day a kragen fucks up Sklar Hast’s abode and instead of waiting on King Kragen to maybe show up, Sklar Hast takes matters into his own hands and rounds up some likeminded fellows to kill the kragen themselves, which they actually come close to doing. The fallout is catastrophic, though, resulting in a schism headed by Sklar Hast with a particularly zealous elder named Barquan Blasdel on the other side. The question comes down to this: Do the elders have any control over King Kragen, or are King Kragen’s appearances merely serendipitous, with the monster’s “help” purely fueled by the prospect of food? This is a Jack Vance story so you know damn well it’s closer to the latter, and come to think of it, questioning and overcoming unjust hierarchies is also a Vance staple. Sklar Hast and his people vow to not only head out on their own, detatching their float from the rest of society, but to kill King Kragen, come hell or high water.

Forgive me, I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time trying not to misspell these weird character names. Not really a Vance story if there aren’t weird character names.

Sklar Hast has manpower on his side, but what he doesn’t heave is the weaponry. Not yet. How do you take down a giant sea monster without guns? Crossbows? Even decent harpoons? They have to figure out how to modernize—to rediscover metal on a planet that’s practically devoid of it, and in the process prove to the elders that they no longer need such an arbitrary quasi-religious order of living. From here on the narrative becomes two-pronged, jumping between Sklar Hast and Barquan Blasdel, the new and the old, as they seek to destroy and protect King Kragen respectively.

There Be Spoilers Here

Mostly I wanna talk about how Sklar Hast and company are able to overpower the Kragen, because it’s… complicated. And also maybe a leap in logic. I’m not a scientist, but I’m not sure if blood works this way. The climactic scene of the men from the renegade float, now with crossbows made of metal and powered with electrical tubes, taking down King Kragen almost made me think more about the logistics of getting all that goddamn metal from burned blood (blood being smoldered down to iron, yes really) than the coolness of the action. And the action can be pretty cool when it’s there! So that says something about how much the solution to the lack of metal makes me scratch my head. The ubiquitous nature of the plant life already threatened to make things too convenient, but this is a bit much. That’s about it. That’s all I felt like saying about that.

A Step Farther Out

I have conflicting feelings as to the length of this thing. The plot is simple enough that I don’t think an extra fifty to a hundred pages would benefit it (mind you that The Blue World itself is quite short), but also I can see that extra wordage benefitting depth, especially character depth but also the workings of Vance’s world. Sklar Hast is a bit of a flat character; he wants one thing for most of the story, which is to kill King Kragen, and we can’t say he matures since he’s shown to be right pretty much from the outset and thus he has no lesson to take from all this. I at least appreciate that the elders, while shown generally to be wrong, are pragmatic enough that they’re not cartoonishly evil, with the exception of Barquan Blasdel. Indeed the pragmatism of the elders becomes part of the novella’s sly humor, which is perhaps chuckle-worthy but never laught-out-loud funny. Even so, I do think Vance’s sense of humor is underrated, and his jokes lend flaor to what would risk becoming a droll and humorless adventure.

I wouldn’t consider “The Kragen” to be Vance’s finest hour, if only because I don’t think it reaches the same level of epicness as his best stories of similar length. Consider that “The Miracle Workers” and “The Last Castle” each fit not only a novel’s worth of world-building into sixty pages, but a novel’s sense of grandeur; these are wondrous tales of action that feel like they’re deserving of big-budget Peter Jackson adaptations. Meanwhile “The Kragen” feels weirdly insular, with even the kragen themselves never being fully allowed to act the part of giant movie monsters. Also, I’m not sure where else to say this, so I’ll say it here: Don’t read “The Kragen” (or most Vance, for that matter) if you absolutely must have women in your fiction. In other words, this is not Vance at his worst, but it’s certainly not his best.

See you next time.