As I’ve said elsewhere, we’re gonna be covering the ’60s in this year-long tribute to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction this month. Picking stories to review for July proved a challenge, but in a good way. Over its 75-year history F&SF has gone through several editors, which is normal, but the ’60s were almost certainly the most tumultuous time in the magazine’s history, for a few reasons. At the beginning of the decade Robert P. Mills was editor, and for the few years he edited F&SF Mills was very capable, arguably even on par with Anthony Boucher; but Mills was an agent and publisher first, and editing wasn’t something he wanted to do as a career. So the torch was passed to Avram Davidson, which sounds like an odd choice with hindsight, but it probably made perfect sense at the time. Davidson was a well-respected writer out of the “new” generation; he was more literary than most of his contemporaries, but he was also… quirkier. For practical reasons more than anything Davidson’s editorship could not last, and so the torch was passed once again, this time to Joseph W. Ferman, with his son Edward assisting him. Joseph lasted about a year before passing the torch to Ed; and this time, by the beginning of 1966, the torch would stay in place, as Ed Ferman would remain editor for the next 25 years. By the last ’60s F&SF had found a new and comfortable niche.
The rapid changing of editors also coincided with a rapid changing of material and reader expectations at this time. The ’60s were the decade of a lot of things: the Vietnam War escalating, racial and socio-economic strife reaching a breaking point, the assassinating of left-leaning public figures, the coming of the hippies. More innocuously it saw the birth of the New Wave, which was spearheaded in the UK by Michael Moorcock and a small army of forward-thinking British writers (although, if it makes you feel better, quite a few important contributors to the New Wave were American), reinventing New Worlds to make it a boundary-pushing powerhouse of a magazine. The US scene was a bit slow to catch up. John W. Campbell and Frederik Pohl lamented the New Wave, but the rascally movement would eventually find a sympathizing magazine in the US with F&SF. Understandably the fiction published in F&SF during this time was a good deal more eclectic than what happened in the ’50s, so it also makes sense the lineup of authors for this month would be a bit eccentric. We have a few of the usual suspects, but we also have… Lin Carter? And Russell Kirk…? We have a New Waver with Brian Aldiss, although the story chosen is decidedly anticipatory of the New Wave rather than part of it. For the most part we have science fiction here, with some horror thrown in; this was not a great time for fantasy in F&SF. Still, I think it’s at least an interesting roster.
Let’s see what’s on our plate.
For the short stories:
“The Oldest Soldier” by Fritz Leiber. From the May 1960 issue. He’s baaaaack. Honestly it’s been too long—in fact it’s been exactly a year since we last covered Leiber. Of course in the interim I’ve not refrained from writing about him on a different outlet or two, and can you blame me? This time we have an entry in his Change War series, being one of the first examples of a time war in SF.
“Hothouse” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the February 1961 issue. Aldiss has a career that goes shockingly far back for someone who died fairly recently, having debuted in the ’50s and almost overnight becoming a force to be reckoned with. Hothouse is usually considered a novel, but as a series of linked stories it won Aldiss a Hugo. This first entry in the “series” is a much-needed reread for me.
“Subcommittee” by Zenna Henderson. From the July 1962 issue. There were quite a few female authors active in the early days of F&SF (more so than other SFF magazines), and one of the most prolific contributors was Henderson. Her fiction often involves families and the experiences of children, and she’s most known for her stories of “The People.” This story, however, is totally standalone.
“The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” by Miriam Allen deFord. From the April 1963 issue. DeFord has one of the most curious careers of any old-timey SF writer, and in 1963 she was almost certainly the oldest living contributor to F&SF, being in her seventies. Prior to taking up genre writing she wrote for socialist and feminist publications, as well as conducting research for Charles Fort.
“Cynosure” by Kit Reed. From the June 1964 issue. Starting in the ’50s and remaining active until her death in 2017 (she lived to be 85), Reed’s work is often quirky, humorous, satirical, but also at times brutal. Her science was never hard, and her disposition makes one think of Shirley Jackson. Both are vicious when it comes to domestic portraits. In other words, Reed was perfect for F&SF.
“Uncollected Works” by Lin Carter. From the March 1965 issue. Acclaimed, if also controversial, as an editor, and pretty notorious as a writer, Carter is probably most responsible for reviving interest in pre-Tolkien fantasy in the ’60s and ’70s. He’d been active as a fan since the ’40s, but “Uncollected Works” was his first solo professional story, and it garnered him a Nebula nomination.
“Balgrummo’s Hell” by Russell Kirk. From the July 1967 issue. Kirk, at least when he was alive, was known more as a conservative political philosopher, and indeed Christianity is integral to both his fiction and non-fiction. But he was also a surprisingly accomplished writer of supernatural horror, and despite being very much an outsider he did sometimes appear in the pages of F&SF.
“They Are Not Robbed” by Richard McKenna. From the January 1968 issue. McKenna gained mainstream recognition with his one novel, The Sand Pebbles, but it seems he used science fiction as a training ground, such that he appeared semi-regularly in the magazines—both before and after his death. McKenna died in 1964, but he apparently had a small trove of stories waiting to be published.
“The Movie People” by Robert Bloch. From the October 1969 issue. Bloch is most known for writing Psycho, but his career started much earlier and much more embedded in the Lovecraftian tradition—indeed he and Lovecraft were correspondents when Bloch was a teenager. On top of writing bestsellers Bloch wrote for film and TV, even penning a few (horror-themed) Star Trek episodes.
Despite having lived an incredibly long life (she was born in 1925 and died in 2019), Katherine MacLean wasn’t the most prolific of writers. She only wrote five novels, only two of which are solo efforts, and one of those is a fix-up. On the short fiction front she didn’t write a whole lot more, although she did have a streak in the ’50s; about half her short fiction was published that decade. MacLean was one of the few lady writers to appear regularly in Astounding (she even debuted there), but like a lot of other writers she hopped on the Galaxy bandwagon, appearing in that magazine’s first issue. “Pictures Don’t Lie” is a prototypical Galaxy-type story, and not unlike another early Galaxy story I reviewed recently, Philip K. Dick’s “The Defenders,” it’s founded on a Big Twist™. Unlike Dick’s story, however, MacLean’s remains effective even when taking the twist into account. Also like the Dick it was adapted for radio as an X Minus One episode, and has even been adapted elsewhere, including an EC Comics adaptation. It’s one of her most reprinted stories for a good reason.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in Invaders of Earth (ed. Groff Conklin), The Great SF Stories #13 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy (ed. Garyn G. Roberts), as well as the MacLean collection The Diploids. It’s also fallen out of copyright, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.
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Joseph R. Nathen is a radio decoder for the American military, which during the Cold War would mean having a job that could potentially involve the difference between a frozen conflict and a hot one. But Nathen has found something a lot more incredible than signals from the other side of the Iron Curtain: he’s found signals of non-human intelligent life. “Squawking,” as he calls it, which needs to be slowed down, but the squawking is certainly not human, yet at the same time can be understood. Radio gives way to TV and it didn’t take long for Nathen to get a TV signal of the alien ship. He wanted pictures. “Pictures are understandable in any language,” he says. Nathen ends up being right about this—but also tragically wrong. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There are only three real characters in this story: Nathen, a journalist named Jacob Luke who’s mostly referred to as the Times man (which Times?), and Nathen’s correspondent on the alien ship, nicknamed Bud. There are a few other characters, mostly journalists who are only called by the outlets they work for (the Herald, the News, and so on), and the dialogue is almost entirely expositional; good thing Nathen is fluent in Expositionese. If this story has a flaw that would turn some readers off it’s that it seems in love with its own attempts at explaining its premise—so dense in exposition as to be hard to digest.
(The X Minus One adaptation does a pretty good job of streamlining the narrative, by giving us a solid viewpoint character [with the Times man] but also massively dialing back the scientific explanation for how the humans and aliens are able to communicate.)
Nathen had used the TV line to send the aliens the Rite of Spring segment of Fantasia, which the aliens not only received in a couple weeks but apparently enjoyed. At first this sounds like a match made in heaven with regards to first contacts: the aliens are not only able to respond back but can communicate, and according to Nathen their planet is “Earth-like.” The aliens seem to be humanoid, and the Earth team is able to receive TV images of the aliens on the ship. The question then remains: What could go wrong? There are a few warning signs, but the humans are unable to make heads or tails of what these abnormalities could mean. For one, the aliens move at a deliriously fast speed. “Something about the way they move…” As Nathen explains, while the images themselves are clear, the speed at which these images are relayed is hard to gauge. “When I turn the tape faster, they’re all rushing, and you begin to wonder why their clothes don’t stream behind them, why the doors close so quickly and yet you can’t hear them slam, why things fall so fast. If I turn it slower, they all seem to be swimming.” Something isn’t right. But still, the aliens intend to land on Earth, right outside the military base where the story’s happening—and soon.
The twist of this story is telegraphed pretty hard, but only with hindsight. I had the good fortune of not knowing the twist beforehand, so I was left with the genuine question of what the catch is—because there has to be a catch with a story like this. MacLean is clever here in that she turns the screw at just the right pace so that if you’re fast enough you can anticipate the twist, but there’s a good chance you won’t; but then you might reread the story and give yourself a pat on the back for taking note of what now reads as obvious foreshadowing. The title is ironic. It borders on postmodern—not in literary technique, obviously, but in how it shows that objective reality, or rather our notion of it, can be untrustworthy. Our perception of reality is based on our senses. The humans and aliens have differently calibrated perceptions and as such they don’t perceive the same space in the same way. When the alien ship comes to Earth the humans don’t see any sign of it by the landing pad, and Bud says the ship can’t see the humans anywhere despite surely having landed on Earth. The atmosphere, Bud says, is too thick—much thicker and soupier than Nathen said. The humans posit that the aliens might’ve landed on Venus by accident (this was when Venus was thought of as a gaseous swamp and not a hellworld), but this can’t be the case. Something has gone wrong, but they don’t know what.
There Be Spoilers Here
The aliens are on Earth alright, and they’re even somewhere near the landing zone—but the humans can’t see the aliens. Bud says that the ship has come under attack and that the humans have to find the ship fast if there’s hope of saving them. It’s there that Nathen and the Times man realize the missing piece of the puzzle—and at the same time realize it’s probably too late to save the ship. It’s one of those great “we’re fucked” moments in old-timey SF, a real sense of having passed the point of no return, like locking your doors after your house has already been robbed, or realizing that one girl you liked had a crush on you as well and you only realize this years after the fact. MacLean gives us a real zinger of a final line, which encapsulates the bizarre tragedy of the situation, for why the humans can’t see the ship—at least not with the naked eye: “We’ll need a magnifying glass for that.” The aliens move at such an odd speed and the atmosphere around them is so thick because they are, in fact, microscopic. The pictures didn’t lie, but they didn’t tell the whole story either. The humans thought they had made contact with likeminded aliens when in fact they were giants who had made contact with beings even smaller than ants, and neither side could figure this out until it was too late. This is how you do a twist ending.
A Step Farther Out
“Pictures Don’t Lie” is basically a tragedy, not caused by technology but aided by it. Even by the early ’50s there’ve been a ton of first contact narratives, such that it would take a bit of ingenuity to write a story of this type that’s truly memorable. MacLean was still very young, and early in her career at this point, but she did have that touch of ingenuity. More impressively it’s a story that raises questions about the utility of the brand-spanking-new technology called television, about how such technology might contribute to first contact with aliens—and how even with this new tech something could go wrong. It’s also a question of size and perspective. We always imagine aliens like how they appear in Star Trek, humanoids that happen to be the same size as humans. MacLean posits we might find life on another planet—or possibly in a grain of sand.
Philip K. Dick is arguably both the funniest and scariest writer to emerge from the early ’50s genre SF boom. He wanted to write full-time for a living, and as a result he wrote at a mile a minute; he would wrote some 120 short stories, about a quarter of which would be published in 1953 alone. “The Defenders” is one of those stories. I’ll say upfront that this is not top-tier Dick, although it is curious for a few reasons and I do have to recommend it. For one, this was the first Dick story to make the cover of a magazine, hence the memorable Ed Emshwiller illustration. It’s also one of only two Dick stories to get adapted for the SF radio series X Minus One, the other being the bone-chilling (and darkly humorous) “Colony.” “The Defenders” and “Colony” were published in Galaxy Science Fiction, which had partnered with X Minus One such that the latter often adapted stories from the former’s pages. Despite being so prolific in the ’50s, Dick only appeared in Galaxy a handful of times while H. L. Gold was editor, apparently because (as often happened with Gold) the two did not get along. Gold had a reputation for meddling with authors’ manuscripts, and indeed there’s a sense of meddling with today’s story. Gold shouldn’t feel too bad, though: Dick would appear in Astounding only a single time.
Another couple things. “The Defenders” reads like a companion piece to “Second Variety,” which I reviewed a minute ago. Both stories cover basically the same topic, and given that they were published five months or so apart it’s safe to say Dick wrote them in close succession; but apart from having similar premises they’re very different stories. More importantly is that Dick would cannibalize the premise and twist of “The Defenders” for the much later novel The Penultimate Truth, and if you know the twist of that novel then you can safely guess the twist of this story. I won’t say what the twist is here, but it’s not hard to figure out.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. “The Defenders” wouldn’t see book publication until Invasion of the Robots (ed. Roger Elwood). Other anthology appearances include There Will Be War (ed. John F. Carr and Jerry Pournelle), Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow: Science Fiction War Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh), and Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (ed. Leigh Ronald Grossman). It’s also in *checks notes* every other Dick collection you can think of. To make things even better, it’s fallen out of copyright, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg here.
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The Cold War went hot eight years ago, with Americans and Soviets having since burrowed underground, hunkering in shelters while the robots, “leadys,” continue to fight the good fight on the surface. The humans would do the fighting themselves, but nuclear fallout from the war’s beginning has rendered the surface uninhabitable—we know this because of newsreel footage and newspaper photos taken of the surface, the leadys keeping humanity updated on a war that seemingly has no end point. “Nobody wanted to live this way, but it was necessary.” Don Taylor is part of his bunker’s military personnel, although despite being in touch with the top brass the higher-ups don’t have a better idea of what’s going on aboveground than Taylor does. (I should probably take a moment to mention that Taylor’s wife, Mary, is in the classic Dick mold, in that she’s rather shrewish. Do not do a drinking challenge where you take a shot every time Dick writes a miserable couple wherein the husband has to put up with his unpleasant wife or ex-wife. What do you mean Dick was already divorced once at this point?) The higher-ups sometimes interrogate leadys to get a more direct line to what’s going on above, but this only goes so far. Nobody, at least on this side, has been to the surface in eight years.
The leadys are the most curious part of the story that isn’t the twist, being shown in the Emshwiller cover. They’re called “leadys” because their lead shells protect them from the radiation on the surface, although they have to be decontaminated every time one is brought underground. It’s also unclear just how they work in the ethical sense, since they’re programmed to not knowingly harm humans—or at least humans on the right side of the conflict, depending. This raises the question of what exactly the leadys are good for, aside from maybe fighting other leadys. Dick seems to conform to Asimov’s three laws of robotics, but he doesn’t delve deep into the matter. The humans bring down a leady for questioning one day and find, to their surprise, that the leady is not radioactive, nor does its chassis have the intense heat of radiation. Don and his superiors figure something must be up, although they can’t be sure what, since as far as they’ve been torn war continues to wage on the surface. But then why no radiation? It’ll be risky, but it looks like humans will be going to the surface for the first time since the war went hot—in leaded clothing, of course. Taylor, his superiors, and a platoon of men plan to go up, but a team of leadys tries to stop them—a fruitless effort, given that the leadys are programmed to not kill humans and so have no way to keep them from going through the Tube.
It’s hard to discuss “The Defenders” without also discussing the twist, but I do wanna point out a couple other things. As is typical of Dick’s early work (with exceptions), the characters aren’t really characters in the Shakespearian sense so much as they exist because the narrative demands human players. Moss and Franks, Taylor’s superiors, are basically interchangeable. Past their immediate circumstances we get to learn nothing about these people. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Dick would become far more ambitious in psychoanalyzing his characters later on, but even at this very early stage there are a few Dick hallmarks that are comforting for the returning fan, sure, but they also serve a purpose. We know life underground is miserable because despite being in a position of authority, Taylor’s life still kinda sucks. The standard Dick protagonist leads an unfulfilled and claustrophobic existence, and this applies even to characters with power, as if to show the hollowness of wanting to acquire power for the sake of itself. Also, as is typical of Dick, the prose is often beige and economical. “The Defenders” just barely qualifies as a novelette, and it feels even shorter than that. Again, not a bad thing. I would’ve had a worse time with this story, given its setup-twist nature, had it overstayed its welcome. I also wanna say the X Minus One adaptation is perfectly decent, much like the source material; it mostly sticks to the short story, with ultimately inconsequential deviations.
There Be Spoilers Here
In one of his books of genre criticism (I forget which one), James Blish lists “The Defenders” as an example of a story whose very existence hinges on its twist, although he doesn’t elaborate on this particular story. He’s undoubtedly accurate with the call, though. If you read early Galaxy you’ll come across a lot of great short SF—indeed some of the best of its kind, certainly in the context of the early ’50s. There were also a lot of setup-punchline stories, and while these weren’t necessarily bad, they could be tiring. Robert Sheckley made a name for himself at the outset with this type of story, but even then it’s clear that he eventually got tired of the routine. Dick could also fall into this trap, and “The Defenders” might be the most setup-punchline of his story; no wonder it would be printed in Galaxy, with Gold having a fondness (really too fond) for just this type of story. And if you know The Penultimate Truth then you already knew what was coming. It turns out the war had basically been over for almost as long as the humans had been living underground. The leadys had been working on reconstructing the surface world whilst feeding the humans (on both sides) false information. That’s right, fake news was a thing in the ’50s! On the one hand this is very much a Dick idea, one he would even return to later; but the execution and implication tell me that either this twist was half-baked or Dick originally had something else in mind but changed it (or maybe Gold changed it) for the sake of appearing in Galaxy.
To elaborate, if there’s one thing Dick does unconvincingly in my experience it’s a happy ending. I’m thinking of Eye in the Sky, arguably the best of his ’50s novels, which while still being an entertaining and mind-bending read, has a tacked-on happy ending that fails to convince. The leadys destroy the Tube and prevent the team of humans from returning underground, leaving them to cooperate with the Soviets for what will probably be several years. “The working out of daily problems of existence will teach you how to get along in the same world,” the top leady says. This is all swell, but it also assumes the leadys really do have the humans’ best interests at heart, which strikes me as fundamentally uncharacteristic for Dick. Contrast this with “Second Variety,” in which the Cold War goes hot, there’s a nuclear holocaust, but the robots are more sinister there. In “The Defenders” the leadys are like a benevolent dictatorship, or Plato’s philosopher king wrapped in iron. You can see what the problem is. This is really out of step with Dick’s generally ambivalent attitude toward robots and automation at large; it’s like he tried to write an Asimov or Simak robot story. And yet it must be said that the twist on its own is good enough that you could do a lot more with it, so it’s unsurprising that Dick would cannibalize it. Still, I found myself feeling underwhelmed by the reveal.
A Step Farther Out
When Dick started out writing professionally he submitted to seemingly every market in the early ’50s, and with a few exceptions he appeared in nearly every genre magazine that would’ve been active in 1953. Sometimes he phoned it in and sometimes you get the feeling the Philip K. Dick we recognize was still in utero. “The Defenders” is very early Dick and feels less Dick-y than the stories previously covered, and of the three it’s easily my least favorite. I recommend it still, but more as a sign of the time and place in which it was written than as a sign of Dick’s genius; for that I’d point towards “Second Variety,” which as I said earlier starts out very similarly to “The Defenders” but goes in a much darker direction. “The Defenders” is an indicative Cold War SF story that happens to have been written by someone who would move on to bigger and better things—something seasoned Dickheads would not find so impressive.
Thomas M. Disch would go down as one of the leading writers of the New Wave era, appearing regularly in New Worlds, and you may even recall I covered the serialization of his 1967 novel Camp Concentration in that magazine’s pages last year. What tends to go ignored, however, is that despite his association with New Worlds it was really Fantastic and Amazing Stories under Cele Goldsmith-Lalli’s editorship that Disch first made his name. He had made his debut in Fantastic in 1962, only 22 years old, and his early work shows a frightening intellect that would see Disch as—along with Samuel R. Delany—an enfant terrible in the ’60s. By his thirtieth birthday he had already written a few novels and enough short stories to fill multiple volumes. Today’s story, “Descending,” possibly shows early Disch at his best; I’d even argue it’s a near-perfect story—except for one thing, which we’ll get to. While ostensibly classified as SF, “Descending” is less conventional science fiction and more existential horror crossed with one of Rudyard Kipling’s machine fables. It’s a real gem of a story.
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First published in the July 1964 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. It was reprinted in the October 1992 issue of Amazing Stories, found here. Ironically “Descending” was reprinted online, but you can only access it via the Wayback Machine: it appeared in 2000 on Sci Fiction as a “classic” reprint. For For anthology reprints we have quite a few: 10th Annual Edition: The Year’s Best SF (ed. Judith Merril), Modern Science Fiction (ed. Norman Spinrad), Decade: The 1960s (ed. Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison), and A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg). Unfortunately it looks like “Descending” has not been reprinted this century thus far. Can we fix this maybe?
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Something that occurred to me only now is that we don’t get a name for the protagonist here. Indeed the only named character is the man’s landlady, Mrs. Beale, who appears briefly at the beginning. The man (what else do you call him?) is unemployed, behind on rent, and only able to buy stuff on credit; this was back when credit cards were a relatively new thing. Even his credit score is bad. Immediately we’re introduced to a kind of capitalist nightmare, with the protagonist being seemingly on the precipice of financial collapse, knowing he’d have to land a job soon or else hit the streets. “He had been a grasshopper for years. The ants were on to his tricks.” He’s been avoiding ruin for a minute now, but Disch sets up at the beginning that Our Anti-Hero™ is about to have a very bad day—possibly even a reckoning. It’s an ominous, paranoid start to the story, and things only get more unnerving from there. At a little under 5,000 words this story does not waste out time, but its briskness also feeds into its allegorical nature. It helps that Disch, even at this early stage (he would’ve been only 22 or 23 when he wrote “Descending”), was a fine-tuned prose stylist.
The man takes the subway to get to Underwood’s Department Store, to get some food and a couple books while he’s at it. (“What’s a department store?” is a question zoomers would be asking, and rightfully so, while also asking, “What are malls?”) He gets some groceries, including a pheasant (raw or pre-cooked he doesn’t know), plus copies of Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, of which the former he starts reading on his escalator ride from the top floor of the department store. Worth mentioning that Vanity Fair‘s subtitle is A Novel Without a Hero, and similarly “Descending” could be considered a short story without a hero, or even without characters in the traditional sense. The man is a schmuck, sure, but past that we get to know very little about him; he’s less a flesh-and-blood person and more a stand-in for man’s anxieties in an industrialized capitalist society. It’s also while reading Vanity Fair on the escalator that he realizes that he has been on this thing for, at the very least, half an hour at this point. Probably much longer. Indeed, he calculates he’d been going from escalator to escalator, ever downward, for over an hour, going from the top floor down to the basement—and then past it. He runs the numbers and it doesn’t look good. “He was in the one-hundred-fifty-second sub-basement. That was impossible.” Indeed it would be impossible, unless you’re in a nightmare.
“Descending” is obviously horror, but past that it’s hard to categorize. I tepidly count as it as SF because the role technology plays in the narrative, although it’s worth noting that we never get an SFnal rationale for why the department store escalators go down seemingly forever. This sort of thing just happens. Like I said earlier, it would be more accurate to call this story a machine fable rather than SF—one with a very dark hue. We also never encounter anyone on the escalators, such that the protagonist is unable to seek out an explanation from some third party, nor even to verbalize his anxiety to another human; it’s just him and the surreal depth of the escalators, which seem to only go down, not up. There are stairs, but at this point it would take hours to go back up to the surface that way. Aside from a water fountain every other floor the man only has his groceries to feed on; he even eventually eats the pheasant, without cooking it or anything. Gradually the man is reduced to a kind of savage. The hours turn into days. A small comfort is that with the total lack of life in the sub-basements he can relieve himself without shame. He’s torn between using the stairs, maybe in vain, to get to the surface, and wanting to see how far down the escalators go. It occurs to him that he’ll probably die here.
“Descending” is clearly an allegory, but this also raises a problem: an allegory for what? When we talk about fables and allegories we talk about something that was written to express a certain meaning, often textual if not thinly buried in subtext. This type of work is not as common now as it would’ve been in the 19th century and earlier, having emerged from actual fables (precursors to the modern short story) and epic poetry, but still there are modern examples. Steinbeck’s The Pearl is an allegory about the inherent violence of greed. Watership Down is basically a retelling of Exodus. Animal Farm is about how the Bolsheviks had murdered the Revolution in its crib. “Descending” is not as obvious about the substance of its allegorical intent, and this is where Disch starts to taunt the reader, hanging the story’s meaning like a carrot on a stick. The protagonist compares himself at different points to works of literature, including The Divine Comedy (very likely an inspiration for this story) and Robinson Crusoe, and it’s like Disch is baiting us into making a connection that ends up being hard to articulate. It’s a story about machinery, the vanity of a down-on-his-luck man, and capitalist automation, but it’s hard to parse what Dish is saying about these things. What makes it work is that even if we are to give up on untangling the substance of the fable, the primordial fear that Disch invokes is effective such that the struggle to make sense of it stops being a concern, much like how the protagonist stops trying to make sense of it. “Because he was hungry and because he was tired and because the futility of mounting endless flights of descending escalators was, as he now considered it, a labor of Sisyphus, he returned, descended, gave in.”
There Be Spoilers Here
I do have one gripe, which is the very end. The ending is not ambiguous so much as it’s worded ambiguously. The protagonist gives up and lies down on the escalator steps, and the last sentence raises a question as to what becomes of him. “That was the last thing he remembered.” Does he die, or lose his sanity? Does someone find him eventually? The wording implies he doesn’t die, but then why “remembered”? I wish writers would be more to-the-point when writing a character’s death. The thing here is that Disch had an amazing premise and knew what to do with it for 95% of the story, but then I’m pretty sure he didn’t know quite how to end it. Given the references to Sisyphus and Dante I feel like Disch could’ve ended on a note that’s at one point less ambiguous and at the same time a lot more audacious. The man wonders if he’ll reach the center of the earth if he keeps going down, but we never see the bottom of the machinery; maybe there is no bottom, like how in Mulholland Drive there may not be a mystery, once you try getting under the surrealism and free association. “Descending” doesn’t so much end as it comes to a stop, once the protagonist finds he can no longer go on and perhaps also when Disch finds he has run out of juice. It’s a little blemish on otherwise excellent writing, probably not enough to not make me give if five stars (if I gave ratings here).
A Step Farther Out
I suspect “Descending” was published in Fantastic because it’s one of those genre-bending stories that’s hard to tame. It’s been reprinted in SF and fantasy anthologies. It also had the misfortune of being published one year prior to the first Nebulas, as I think it would’ve been a shoe-in for a nomination there. (Seemingly every third short story printed in 1965 got a Nebula nomination, but “Descending” would’ve actually been deserving of it.) Disch was on a roll at this early period, and while he doesn’t quite stick the landing here, it’s such a good performance overall that I have to give it a hearty recommendation. Sometimes I struggle to write a review for something because I unfortunately felt I was not given much to talk about, but with “Descending” I had the opposite (and much better) problem: this story was almost too dense for me to write about it. Rest assured we’ll be returning to Disch before too long.
I’m of the position that it’s perfectly fine to like art one finds “problematic,” which is how I’m able to say I like Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers while also finding the arguments he makes in that novel deeply flawed and at times repugnant. I’m saying this upfront as I wanna make it clear, before I get into the really dirty stuff, that this is not an essay in which I merely shit on such a famous novel, call Heinlein a fascist, and so on, which seems to have been a favorite pastime for left-leaning science fiction fans for the past sixty-odd years. Starship Troopers is, in a sense, evergreen, because it was controversial at the time of its publication and it continues to draw heated discussion from people who often either have not read it or have read it but misremember it to a tragic degree, even conflating details unique to the novel with the very loose film adaptation. I’ve read this novel twice, once when I was about sixteen and again a couple years ago, finding on that second reading that I had, in fact, forgotten most of it. Starship Troopers is one of the most famous and misremembered “canonical” SF novels; and unfortunately, no matter how you look at it, it also set a horrible precedent from which the genre still has not recovered. It’s totally possible the genre will never recover from such an impact so long as there are creative minds in the field (and by extension likeminded readers) who believe in Heinlein’s argument: that sometimes extermination is the only option.
Let’s wind back the clock a bit, since there’s a buffet of context for how such a unique and thorny novel like Starship Troopers happened. Such a work of art does not simply fall out of the sky, or emerge from the primordial slime that is the Freudian unconscious, but is basically the result and summation of an artist’s political evolution. Heinlein is one of the most complicated writers in all of science fiction and the fact that there are multiple biographies on him has done little to make his complexity more manageable. The reality is that Heinlein contains multitudes, and that when two people discuss Heinlein there’s a good chance each of them is not talking about quite the same person. Some basic facts that we all know: that Robert Anson Heinlein was born in Missouri in 1907; that he served in the Navy for five years when the country was in peacetime and was discharged because of severe illness; that illness would plague him pretty much all his adult life, to the point where he was on the brink of death more than once; that he married three times, the second (to Leslyn MacDonald) and third (Virginia Gerstenfeld) playing profound roles in his life; that he seemed interested in “free love” as early as the ’30s; that he started out as a New Deal Democrat and a fellow traveler to democratic socialist causes before drifting rightward; that he didn’t see publication until he was in his thirties, although he had written a whole novel before his first sale. But we’re just getting started.
The conventional narrative is that Heinlein started out as pretty liberal and then, over the course of the ’40s, became a right-winger, albeit one with some very unconventional ideas. He supported Barry Goldwater and later Ronald Reagan, and yet there are scenes in Stranger in a Strange Land and some later novels that would surely make a Reagan Republican break out in hives. In the late ’40s he got into a deal with Scribner’s to write SF aimed at younger readers, which turned out to be a splendid partnership for both parties: Scribner’s got what many now call Heinlein’s overall strongest work, and Heinlein got to feel the legitimacy of a mainstream publisher. The first of such novels, Rocket Ship Galileo, was published in 1947, and indeed 1947 turned out to be a major year for Heinlein on multiple fronts: it was the year he returned to writing fiction (after a five-year hiatus), made his deal with Scribner’s, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post for the first time (another big achievement for a genre writer), and divorced Leslyn so he could marry Virginia. (Heinlein and Virginia had met as part of their jobs during World War II, and it’s likely Virginia’s conservatism had influenced Heinlein in his changing politics.) Heinlein’s career is sometimes split into three or four phases, depending, but I go with the latter as I find there to be a break between his run at Scribner’s (1947-1958) and the publication of Starship Troopers. Of course, Starship Troopers began life as another “juvenile” for Scribner’s, but Heinlein had other plans.
Reading the juveniles, you get hints of Heinlein’s eccentric conservatism but there’s nothing in these books that would magically convince some teenager to vote for Trump (or whatever oligarch the Republicans cough up in four years); these are mostly “apolitical” reads. Even something overtly political like Between Planets only gives us a faint glimmer of the madness that is to come later. At first Starship Troopers seems to follow in the footsteps of those juveniles, being about a young man who comes of age and contributes to saving humanity (or perhaps not) in the process. Johnny Rico is like the protagonists of Heinlein’s juveniles, except for a couple things, like the fact that he’s not white but Filipino (you may recall he’s played by the lily-white Casper Van Dien in the movie), and the fact that he ultimately doesn’t do much of anything heroic. Come to think of it, Rico barely does anything in the book, which is one of several things that struck me on that second reading. Still, he’s a good American boy who doesn’t go chasing after girls, and while he starts out as mildly rebellious he comes to learn the “value” of military discipline. The book is essentially split into two sections we jump back and forth across: scenes where stuff happens and scenes where fucking nothing happens. Funnily enough, people tend to forget about the former and focus on the latter when discussing the political implications of this book. In a sense this is fair enough, since the scenes where Jean V. Dubois (the obvious Heinlein stand-in) quite literally lectures at Rico are where the book’s politics become hardest to ignore.
Dubois is not so much a character as he is Heinlein trying to articulate his position on what was, in the late ’50s, a simmering Cold War. He’s a teacher of “history and moral philosophy” who shit-talks Marx and pacifism, being one of many examples that dispels the myth of higher education being filled with leftists. (I remember I took a public speaking course in my last year of college, and our professor was also a local pastor and openly conservative. I wonder how he’s doing now.) See, the conflict at the heart of the novel is that humanity is at war with the “bugs,” a highly intelligent and ferocious alien race that, like this humanity of the future, is set to colonize the stars. There’s no room for diplomacy between the races—no middle ground. Dubois boils the war down to this: only one of these races can survive. The logical conclusion, then, is that the bugs must be exterminated. Genocide. Of course Dubois’s argument (and by extension Heinlein’s) is that since the bugs “clearly” want humanity exterminated as well, this is only fair. If we’re to take this argument and apply it to any real-world situation, the optics are very bad. It is worth mentioning, however, that Heinlein was responding to a nuclear disarmament campaign, and indeed the question of whether the US should continue above-ground hydrogen bomb testing was a tough one in the ’50s. If you know me at all then you can guess which side I fall on, and you can also tell it’s not the same side as Heinlein.
(A lily-white Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers, 1997.)
Before World War II had even ended, a race had begun between the US and Soviet Union to build not only the atomic bomb but a nuclear arsenal. Once the Cold War kicked in there was the question of the possibility of nuclear holocaust, but also whether either side of the Iron Curtain would dismantle its nuclear weapons program. A year prior to the publication of Starship Troopers, Heinlein wrote an essay titled “Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?,” so named after one of the Founding Fathers, in which Heinlein argues in favor of nuclear testing. His concern with nuclear holocaust at the hands of them no-good Russians seemed to inspire his working on Starship Troopers, but it’s here that we quickly run into a problem. If the bugs are meant to be analogous to the Soviets, then what is Heinlein suggesting? That the Cold War turn hot? That we nuke Moscow? Sounds outlandish, but as of right now we’ve also had at least one major politician suggest that nuking the Gaza strip might be a good idea. Was Heinlein being a genocidal maniac, or was he muddying his own argument? I’m inclined towards the former, but I also think consequences matter about as much as intent, and the harsh reality is that, regardless of whether he meant it, the result is that Starship Troopers unequivocally argues in favor of genocide. It’s a novel that states, pretty explicitly, that brute force is the only way to resolve the conflict, and also that brute force has solved more problems than anything else in human history. Rico, as part of his arc, comes to believe this.
“Genocide” is a word that conservatives and many liberals hate, for reasons that make no sense to those who properly value human life. It’s a word that implies culpability on a mass scale, and as you know, reactionaries try not to believe in systems or the masses—only individual “bad actors.” The 20th century, which Heinlein was constantly in dialogue with, was also the century that codified our understanding of genocide—the systematic murder of an entire people. The Belgian murdering and mutilating of the Congolese, the American slaughtering and assimilating of native tribes, the Ottomans rounding up Armenians like cattle, the Germans exterminating the Herero and Nama peoples in Africa, indeed the Germans exterminating Jews, Romani, and others groups; and of course, the Israelis exterminating and displacing Palestinians since the ’40s. Genocide has also had a fruitful (far too fruitful) history in SF. The space operas of E. E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton often posit that mass murder on a planetary scale might be the only way to resolve the conflict of the week. In Star Wars, entire planets get blown to bits and Our Heroes™ react mildly, if they verbally acknowledge the enormous loss of life at all. Starship Troopers itself was a major forerunner to what we now call military SF, and its influence is such that you can see its DNA in everything from giant robot anime to Warhammer 40K. Even those who take the opposite position of Heinlein and respond to his novel are prone to do so using Heinlein’s tools. Thus the novel’s insane bloodlust is now part of SF’s own DNA, by virtue of being so popular and, ultimately, a compelling (if muddy) argument that makes it sound as if mass murder were perfectly reasonable.
Unfortunately the cat’s been out of the bag since 1959. Starship Troopers was serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in abridged form as Starship Soldier, then published in book form a month after the serial’s first installment by G. P. Putman’s Sons (Scribner’s had rejected the book and so Heinlein’s relationship with them ended). The book was immediately controversial but just as immediately amassed a devoted readership, resulting in it winning the Hugo for Best Novel the following year. It has never gone out of print. It remains one of the most famous SF novels of all time. The irony with Starship Troopers is that while it is very much in favor of militarism, to the point of imagining a “utopia” where only people who’ve served the government get the vote, it’s also in other ways a progressive novel for its time. Rico is non-white and isn’t written stereotypically at all. The society of the novel seems pretty egalitarian and even post-racial. Women serve in the military, which wasn’t even a thing in the US at the time. Even so, conservatives love this novel because it is gleefully pro-war and (I suspect) because it argues that even in a post-racial society, humanity has the right to relegate some race of intelligent beings to the status of “other”—or even “subhuman.” No doubt Israel’s defenders think of Palestinians as like Heinlein’s bugs; it’s a line of thought that humanity has been paying for, in blood. I think Starship Troopers is a good novel; I enjoy reading it; I also wish Heinlein, for our sakes, had never written it.
Not much to say with regards to updates here, other than I’m looking into a tutoring gig and I seem to be starting a polycule, the latter of which I’ve heard is kinda like starting a rock band. If anyone wants to join, please let me know. There are no gimmicks for this month’s review forecast, except that we have a complete novel on our hands for the first time in what feels like forever, and we’ve got a few familiar faces returning to the site. I may have also intentionally picked Lucius Shepard and Aliette de Bodard stories with similar titles. One thing I’ve been thinking about that I’ve decided to act on is reviewing more reprints of classic stories; one every couple months seems like a good deal. The reason for this is at least twofold: I have a soft spot for the classics, but I also wanna cover authors from the pre-pulp years who contributed to genre fiction. This month I’ll be reviewing an SF story by Jack London, who is not known primarily for his SF but who indeed wrote a lot of it. Once again Jack Vance will be providing the novel, which is unsurprising since quite a few of his novels first appeared in magazines, either as serials or all in one piece like this month’s novel.
Don’t wanna keep you long; just letting you know we have another month packed with fiction that looks to be at least interesting, although it’s mostly SF with a couple fantasy stories thrown in.
For the novellas:
“Birthright” by April Smith. From the August 1955 issue of If. Smith sadly is one of many women who wrote SF in the pre-New Wave days whom we know basically nothing about. We don’t know when she was born or when she died. She’s a ghost. She has one solo story, “Birthright,” to her credit, plus one collaboration. ISFDB classifies this story as a novelette, but running the Project Gutenberg text through a word processor shows it’s just over 17,500 words.
“Polyphemus” by Michael Shea. From the August 1981 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Shea had a varied career, lasting from the ’70s until his death in 2014. His work ran the gamut from SF to high fantasy to the Cthulhu Mythos. He won the World Fantasy Award multiple times for his fantasy and horror. His most famous story, “The Autopsy,” is an SF-horror hybrid, and “Polyphemus” looks to be a similar blend of the two genres.
For the short stories:
“The Shadow and the Flash” by Jack London. From the June 1948 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. First published in 1903. London was one of the most popular and prolific authors of the early 20th century, despite dying young. He’s best known for his adventure stories set in the Klondike, such as The Call of the Wild and White Fang, but he also wrote a surprising amount of science fiction.
“The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” by E. Lily Yu. From the September-October 2016 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Yu burst onto the scene with her story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” which nabbed her several award nominations. She won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer the same year she graduated from Princeton, which is no small feat.
“The Jaguar Hunter” by Lucius Shepard. From the May 1985 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Speaking of late bloomers, Shepard didn’t start writing fiction as an adult until he was deep in his thirties, but he quickly emerged as one of the defining SFF writers of the ’80s. If you’ve read enough Shepard then you know he has a “type,” and this story looks to be typical Shepard.
“Descending” by Thomas M. Disch. From the July 1964 issue of Fantastic. Feels like it’s been a long time since I covered Disch, with his novel Camp Concentration. Disch was one of the daring young writers to kick off the New Wave in the ’60s, although despite being a regular at Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds he actually first appeared in Fantastic, under Cele Goldsmith-Lalli’s editorship.
“The Defenders” by Philip K. Dick. From the January 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been ten months since I last talked about Dick on here, which in my book is too long a wait. The thing about Dick is that he’s become frankly over-discussed in “serious” SF discussions, or at least his most famous novels. Thankfully this is not the case with many of his short stories, such as this one.
“The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard. From the July 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Of Vietnamese heritage, living in France, and writing predominantly in English, de Bodard has a curious cultural background, so it makes sense she would concoct one of the most curious future histories in modern SF. Spacefaring humanity here is decidedly non-white and non-American.
For the complete novel:
Planet of the Damned by Jack Vance. From the December 1952 issue of Space Stories. The early ’50s were a formative period for Vance, who was showing himself to be one of the most imaginative talents at the time—albeit one whose efforts were mostly relegated to second-rate magazines. I’ve previously coveredBig Planet, which was a breakthrough title for Vance, and now we’re on Vance’s follow-up novel, published just a few months later. Planet of the Damned has a rather convoluted publication history: as with Big Planet, the magazine version and not the first book version served as the basis for future “definitive” reprints. It’s also been printed as Slaves of the Klau and Gold and Iron.
Carol Emshwiller came a bit late to the whole writing-fiction thing, not even writing her first novels until she was in her sixties, but she would have one of the longest and most acclaimed careers of any modern SF writer. She started in the mid-’50s and remained more or less active until her death in 2019; the crazy part is that she would remain a high-quality writer over that sixty-year span. She steppd away from writing for much of the ’60s but returns just in time to contribute to Dangerous Visions, with one of its better stories, “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison.” Despite having started in the ’50s, Emshwiller changed her colors like a chameleon and fit right in with the New Wave crowd—and then changed again for the post-New Wave years. This is a degree of versatility most writers couldn’t manage.
I should probably mention at this point that Carol was the wife of legendary illustrator (later experimental filmmaker) Ed Emshwiller. Yeah. In one of the cuter instances of both halves of a couple being successful creative types, Ed sometimes illustrated Carol’s stories, including the cover depicting “Day at the Beach” that you see above. (It would have to be the cover because F&SF made it a policy to not have interior illustrations for stories.) “Day at the Beach,” while short and simple in a way, has enough evocative imagery that such a cover might’ve been earned; you could do a lot worse than this one. It’s a post-nuclear fable that reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in its grimness but also its central message.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was reprinted in The Year’s Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition (ed. Judith Merril), An ABC of Science Fiction (ed. Tom Boardman, Jr.), Future Love: A Science Fiction Anthology (ed. Victoria Williams), Beyond Armageddon: Twenty-One Sermons to the Dead (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Walter M. Miller, Jr. [?!]), and the Emshwiller collection The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller Vol. 1. Unfortunately, if what I’ve heard is true, the proofreading for that last one is really bad.
Enhancing Image
We meet Myra, a housewife who has “neither eyebrows nor lashes nor even a faint, transparent down along her cheeks.” She is in fact totally hairless, and so is her husband Ben. Their son, named Littleboy, is however a different story, being “the opposite of his big, pink and hairless parents, with thick and fine black hair growing low over his forehead and extending down the back of his neck.” Littleboy is three-and-a-half years old and we’re told that things were normal not long before then, when nuclear war broke out; it’s implied Littleboy was in utero when Myra and Ben got a generous dose of radiation. Emshwiller is light on the details: we’re never told who fired the first shot, which countries went to war (although we can guess(), or how much of civilization is left after the fallout. Presumably not much. I say “post-nuclear” but it’s fair to call “Day at the Beach” a post-apocalyptic tale. And then Myra gets the idea to take her family to the beach. It’s a nice sunny Saturday—or at least she thinks it’s a Saturday; she’s unsure.
We aren’t told a lot about what life in such a future is like. We know oil is apparently a precious and fought-over commodity, like in Mad Max, and that the family is used to having to defend itself through violent means, as we’ll see later. What do they do for food? It’s not dwelled on. “Day at the Beach” is about ten pages long, and if anything it could be longer, which is the best kind of negative criticism. It’s a slice-of-life narrative in the allegorical mode, which as I said before reminds me of The Road, albeit with a lot less cannibalism. (There isn’t any on-screen cannibalism, don’t worry.) It’s a story about making way for the next generation, of “carrying the fire” as McCarthy liked to put it, in spite of horrendous circumstances. Myra and Ben are disfigured from the radiation and Littleboy is undoubtedly a mutant, but they don’t love him any less for it. Even Littleboy’s unconventional name alludes to the story’s allegorical nature, with the child being a stand-in for the next generation. As Anthony Boucher says in the introduction, it’s about “the endurance and adaptability of the human spirit.”
The family has a simple goal in mind, which is to hang out at the beach—alone. They don’t seem to have any mutuals, no oomfies or pookies to call on for such an occasion; but then maybe solitude in the midst of nature is what Myra and Ben want. It’s a tranquel scene, although I have to say I’m not sure if letting Littleboy go swimming in the buff was the norm for really young children in the ’50s or if it’s a casualness brought on by the end of civilization and public decency laws. Probably the latter. It does feed into the sense of tranquility, and of a kind of purity. They may not be a sight for sore eyes (although I must admit that going by her depiction in Ed’s cover, Myra rocks the bald look), but that doesn’t make them any less kind to each other. In the years during and following World War II there was much speculation on what life might be like in the wake of nuclear fallout, from Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother” to Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. The idea of humanity becoming mutated, with negative or possibly even positive effects, from the bombs was a popular one. Actually the “human mutants” stock is still high, if the continuing popularity of the Fallout series (now with its own TV show) is anything to go by.
Emshwiller seems to suggest that while life is rough, and some harsh decisions must be made, and although our descendants may look different from us, they (probably) won’t be any less human. Governments may fall and capitalism might (hopefully) end at some point (as Lovecraft says, “even death may die”), but the average person, with even a little bit of luck, will persist. Like the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath (indeed the migrant workers who now suffer on the receiving end of border violence), the survivors of nuclear catastrophe will not go quietly into the night. In a way it can be thought of as a response (although Emshwiller probably didn’t intend this, and anyway I have no way of proving it) to Merril’s most famous story—a ray of hope to the stark terror of “That Only a Mother.”
There Be Spoilers Here
I’m tired.
A Step Farther Out
So that’s it. End of the month. I didn’t end on the strongest note, but the Emshwiller is a good example of F&SF‘s range of fiction and willingness to take on more poetic material. In 1959 (incidentally this was the only story Emshwiller saw published in 1959) there were really only a couple options for “Day at the Beach.” Maybe Galaxy would’ve taken it. The genre SF market had shrunk massively; certainly it was no longer the market of near-endless possibilities that it would’ve been at the start of the decade. F&SF was arguably the only American SFF magazine that was doing really well at this point. The late ’50s and early ’60s were a low period for short fiction writers, and this was especially true the women. A lot of female writers would leave the field around 1960 in search of greener pastures, no doubt in part due to the market shrinking massively, and Emshwiller would be one of those women who stepped away from the scene.
Holger Carlsen is a Danish immigrant of unknown parentage studying engineering in America when World War II breaks out. Returning to his homeland, Holger joins the resistance movement and one night is trapped on a beach facing certain death from the Nazis when an explosion from somewhere sends him into a totally different land. He quickly comes across a horse saddled with equipment fit for a knight, including a shield with three hearts and three lions emblazoned on it. After an encounter with a conniving witch we are introduced to our other members of the party: Hugi, a jolly if brutish dwarf; and Alianora, a maiden who can turn into a swan at will. Holger has two main goals: to find a way to return home and to figure out who he is supposed to be, since clearly he is inhabiting someone else’s body. While his mindset is initially self-centered, Holger soon realizes he has been catapulted into a conflict much larger than himself, between the forces of Law and Chaos, between order and entropy.
Being an agnostic both in faith and in his allegiances at the outset, Holger is tempted by the forces of Chaos who see him as potentially useful—first by the whores of Duke Alfric and then by the sorceress Morgan le Fay, who claims she has the key to Holger’s past. To make matters more complicated, the line between Holger’s own memories and those of his alter ego start to blur. He remembers little bits and pieces of this other self, including a fluency in Latin and something about a sword named Cortana. He suspects that he has entered a parallel world where the mythical exploits of Charlemagne were real, yet there is another piece to the puzzle he has to acquire. If he can uncover his past then maybe he can help defeat the forces of Chaos—but doing so will take the help of a wizard.
Enhancing Image
Some notes:
While the romance between Holger and Alianora is still rather limp (Anderson was never the best at writing women), it does work on a thematic level since Alianora is supposed to be Morgan le Fay’s mirror image, or rather the other way around. You could choose between the chaste and dull but well-meaning girl or you could go with the bad bitch who will probably kill you if you turn her down. Personally I would have to sit down and think about it.
Speaking of which, I was reminded of Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time, which is in part about resisting fascism even as it takes on the form of a beautiful and feisty woman. The reality that a lot of liberals don’t wanna acknowledge is that fascism can sound tempting. How else can you explain millions of people falling for such a patently destructive ideology? Holger could rule the world with Morgan at his side or he could fight and possibly die on the side of good. Not quite as clean-cut as one would hope, but then this is a story about ultimately rejecting the dark side of human nature.
Harping on the women just a bit more, much is made of the fact that Holger, who while not ugly or a wimp was not a lady’s man back home, now has to dodge female affection like it’s bullets in The Matrix. Multiple women either fall for him or just wanna jump his bones over the course of the story. Obviously this is part of the power fantasy, but Anderson tries rationalizing it by saying that while Holger doessn’t know the man whose body he’s currently in, other people sure as hell recognize him, and this knight of the three hearts and three lions is undoubtedly a big deal in this world.
Aside from the contrivance of Holger suddenly becoming a chick magnet, much of the plot is driven by educated guesses that turn out to be correct. Holger theorizes that the world he’s been thrown into is an alternate Earth where magic is real and the legends of Charlemagne were true, and this theory turns out to be correct. The wizard Martinus later theorizes that Morgan had spirited Holger away to our Earth as an infant, and this also proves correct. What are the odds? Granted, these contrivances are not unusual for old-school high fantasy writing. At least Anderson tries to justify what he’s doing.
This is an early example of an RPG-style party in fantasy writing—not the first, because even The Hobbit precedes it by nearly two decades, but for American fantasy it was certainly prescient. Fantasy heroes before then were typically lone wolves, or in the case of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser a dynamic duo, but by the time we reach the back end of this story we have Holger, Hugi, Alianora, and the Muslim knight Carahue. Each member fills a certain niche in what should be a well-rounded party. Alianora would no doubt be a white mage.
Carahue himself is a pretty good depiction of a Muslim character, given the circumstances. Holger is suspicious of him at first, not because of his race or religion but because other characters had warned him that such a knight had been looking for the man whom Holger is posing as—for good or ill, nobody could say. Turns out Carahue is buddies with the guy Holger is acting as. We’re told, once Holger regains his memories as Holger Danske, a paladin who fought for Charlemagne, that Holger and Carahue had met in battle and gained each other’s respect. There’s a religious tolerance here that historically has been sorely lacking in the US, and even today there are far too many Christian/Jewish Americans who treat Muslims—at best—like children.
Those reading this story expecting some grand faceoff with Morgan and her army will be disappointed. The climactic battle is with a bunch of “cannibals” and “savages,” as part of the Wild Hunt. Hugi gets mortally wounded in the battle, sadly. What’s strange is that in most narratives this would serve as the end-of-second-act lowest point for our heroes before they get put to the test one last time; but no, this is the final action scene, at least in the serial version. Once Holger finds Cortana all his memories of his former life come back to him and next thing we know we’re in the epilogue. There is an epic final battle between Law and Chaos, but we don’t get to see it.
I remembered Holger converting to Catholicism once he gets returned home in the epilogue, but I did not remember a rather strange remark the narrator makes. The idea is that Holger is a Danish paladin who fought to bring balance to the world, and the narrator says something vague about real-world conflict. “It may be that we shall need Holger Danske again.” This is the late ’40s, mind you; the Cold War was just getting started. I have to assume Anderson is referring to the Cold War here, but I’m more wondering what role Holger could play in this conflict. Anderson was a liberal when he wrote the serial version, but by the time he expanded it into a novel he had turned conservative. That the last sentence is the same in both makes me wonder what Anderson could’ve meant at either time.
A Step Farther Out
Three Hearts and Three Lions was an outlier when it was first serialized in F&SF, and even for Anderson’s body of work it stands out from other fantasy stories of his I’ve read. I had read the novel version first, then went back to the serial, and while both have issues with pacing, I do think the serial version is more tightly woven. Anderson didn’t change shit around for the novel so much as he added stuff on, much of it not strictly necessary. There’s more of a sense of scale with the novel (we get something like an epic final battle, whereas the Wild Hunt is the serial’s climax), but there’s almost a more personal touch to the serial. Here it’s not so much about war between good and evil as it is about one man’s spiritual conflict, between redicovering his true self as a Christian warrior and giving into the temptations of Chaos. I would say it’s a Christian allegory, but the conflict is more text than subtext; it must’ve been strange but also captivating for a largely irreligious audience, though it no doubt appealed to the Catholic (if liberal-minded) Anthony Boucher. Religion being wedded to fantasy was not strictly new even in 1953, as C. S. Lewis had already started his Chronicles of Narnia, but Lewis also hated rationalism, whereas Anderson did not.
Edgar Pangborn is an author I discovered only this year who is quickly looking to become a favorite of mine. Sure, part of that is because Pangborn seems, in some ways, to be a successor to Clifford Simak in his pastoralism and gentle sentimentalism, but there are also some striking differences; I’m pretty sure Simak would not have written Davy, for one. But still, they’re kindred spirits in that they were, uncharacteristically for genre SF of the time, driven by empathy and a need for peace among men. The atrocities of World War II inspired Simak’s anti-war stance, and the same can probably be said for Pangborn, although with the latter there’s also this palpable fear of nuclear annihiliation—not from the Soviets, but that someone on either side could send humanity into oblivion. Davy, and the other stories set in that universe (a loose series that consumed most of Pangborn’s fiction output after 1960), explores the line humanity must tow, between despair and hope. His 1954 novel A Mirror for Observers similarly asks, in rather Christian allegorical terms, if humanity can be saved.
“Angel’s Egg” was not Pangborn’s first published work of fiction, but it was his SFF debut. For a while I thought this was my first Pangborn short story, but actually I had previously read “The Golden Horn,” which then became part of Davy. Close enough. By the time Pangborn started writing SFF he was already in his forties, and reading “Angel’s Egg” you might get the impression it was written by someone twenty years older and in the twilight of his career; I don’t mean this in a bad way. Pangborn is one of those writers who seemed to be fully formed in his craft right out the gate, and he’s also of a perpetually melancholy sort. He was never that popular, but was and is respected enough by those who’ve read him to have been deserving recipient of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in Invaders of Earth (ed. Groff Conklin), A Century of Science Fiction (ed. Damon Knight), The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (ed. Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg), The Great SF Stories Volume 13, 1951 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and the collection Good Neighbors and Other Strangers. If you wanna read “Angel’s Egg” for free and without having to deal with legal grey areas, you can! It’s on Project Gutenberg.
Enhancing Image
Starting off with not a criticism of the story per se, but the introductory blurb for this is not one of H. L. Gold’s better pieces of writing. It gives the false impression that we’re in for something comedic, perhaps with a dose of social commentary, which I would say is Robert Sheckley-esque except Sheckley would not debut for another year. There’s a bit of social commentary in “Angel’s Egg,” but it is most certainly not a comedy. I sometimes wonder if authors have any say in the blurbs editors write for their stories in magazines, and I have to assume no because I struggle to believe Pangborn had approved of Gold’s crassness with what is a very tender story.
Anyway, we start with a framing narrative in which we’re informed that David Bannerman, the protagonist, has died. Like with Charles Foster Kane we’re introduced to our main character as he has already exited the world of the living, with the ensuing narrative looking backwards and trying to make sense of the last days of the man’s life. Bannerman is (or was) a middle-aged academic who lives a lonely and uncomplicated existence. He has no close family. He never married. “For the last twelve summers he occupied a small cottage on a back road about twenty-five miles from [the] city, and had few visitors.” The closest he has to human company is Steele, a nearby farmer. An injury obtained during World War I, which as happens sometimes only got worse over the years, prohibits Bannerman from physically strenuous activities. It’s easy to forget this once we get caught up in the narrative, but two things are made apparent at the beginning: a) that Bannerman is a war veteran, and b) that despite having served his country he was apparently accused of being a commie sympathizer during what was, in 1951, the ongoing Red Scare, hence the framing device.
Now, it’s at this point that I feel compelled to bring up the ways in which Pangborn might’ve projected himself onto Bannerman, or rather how there’s a hint of autobiography in the latter. For one, the two were both lifelong bachelors, but their dipositions are also pretty similar. It was brought to my attention through Rich Horton’s review of A Mirror for Observers that Pangborn might’ve been gay, although we don’t have any hard evidence to prove this. At the risk of playing armchair psychologist, I do think it’s very likely that Pangborn was gay, and also that he probably never got to be in a fulfilling romantic relationship. There’s an entrenched loneliness in “Angel’s Egg” and A Mirror for Observers (not to mention the frankly odd way in which relations between men and women are written in Davy) that suggests the queer, although obviously I’m biased on that front. I know I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but bear with me.
One day Camilla, a grumpy old hen on Bannerman’s land, lays a batch of unfertilized eggs—only one of these eggs could not have not have come naturally from the hen, because it does not resemble any egg of any animal Bannerman can think of. “It was a deep blue, transparent, with flecks of inner light that made me think of the first stars in a clear evening.” And there’s something inside. A few days later the egg hatches, and it’s here that we’re introduced to the “angel” of the title, which is of course an alien. The angel resembles a small girl, and is humanoid enough in appearance, except this alien also resembles a bird in that she’s mostly covered in feathers. It’s at this point that the average human would be awe-struck, or even driven to a mental institution, but Bannerman is pretty chill with what turn out to be alien visitors. Why not? It’s not like he has to explain this to anyone. He is one lonely man who lives with his dog Judy, some chickens, and the open air. Never mind Bannerman also considers himself a “naturalist,” and is thus taken to questions of how the angels work.
Worth mentioning is that we never learn what the aliens call themselves; they’re called angels in-story because that’s what Bannerman calls them. No doubt there’s something of the Christian allegory at play here, which must’ve been unusual for what was, even in the early ’50s, a mostly agnostic genre SF readership. Was Pangborn himself a Christian? Maybe. At least by the time he wrote Davy he seemed to take an ambivalent stance on organized religion, and after all one doessn’t have to be Christian to find worth or usefulness in the Christian allegorical mode. I mean Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure but I seriously doubt the guy who wrote Macbeth was a regular churchgoer. This religious undercurrent might’ve also made Gold uncomfortable with the story, despite him obviously being fond of it, and indeed it reads like something that doesn’t wholly fit in with any publication of the time—not even Galaxy, which cast a pretty wide net in the early ’50s. The angels being telepathic (hence they’re being able to communicate with Bannerman and even the animals) made me sigh and also wonder if maybe Pangborn had submitted it to Astounding, but maybe John W. Campbell also didn’t know what to make of it.
Camilla dies. She was already up there in years, but the angel had decided to carry out what one might call assisted suicide. Normally in this situation the alien killing some farm animal would be a harbinger for greater horrors to come, but Bannerman and Pangborn make it very clear that this was not a killing done out of malice or ignorance, but mercy. “She was old. She wanted a flock of chicks, and I couldn’t stay with her. So I—so I saved her life,” says the angel, or rather projects it into Bannerman’s mind. Immediately it sounds strange, to “save” Camilla’s life, because on the surface that’s not what happened. What does the angel mean by “saved,” anyway? Being that the alien is called an angel, we’re obviously supposed to take it as saving someone in the Christian sense—made stranger because this is a chicken we’re talking about, and presumably chickens don’t have souls. There is, however, a second meaning to the word that we’ll discover soon enough. The mystery raised turns out to be not threatening but rather philosophical. The angel and her kin taking up residence on Bannerman’s land could lead to horror or hijinks, but Pangborn doesn’t go with either of those options.
A few things to note before I get into the real conflict of the story, which I’d rather discuss in the spoilers section than here: The angel rapidly maturing, physically, leads to a remark or two from Bannerman that might discomfort the modern reader. Also, the angel is basically a nude human woman but mostly covered in feathers (although her chest is not), which is depicted in a David Stone interior, and this must’ve been pretty racy for readers of the time. Because this is an epistolary narrative we’re stuck in Bannerman’s head except for the framing device, and while I’m not exactly a fan of the epistolary mode (because I’m not terribly interested in reading people’s letters), it makes sense here. Pangborn must’ve considered writing a simple first-person narration, but realized that could not work given the ending, not to mention that the pacing is such that we’re drip-fed information through journal entries. It’s a bit of a long novelette, but except for the very end (which I’ll get to) I think it’s well-paced.
There Be Spoilers Here
Much of the story is concerned with facing death, and in the case of Bannerman it’s being given the choice of either dying naturally or giving up his life for something much greater than himself. Earlier the angel had “saved” Camilla, and later does the same for Judy. Being saved, for the angels, means giving up one’s physical body to have one’s memories pooled into a collective consciousness—like if you were to upload your memories to a computer hard drive. Indeed when reading it I thought that had Pangborn lived and written “Angel’s Egg” some three decades later it could very feasibly be appropriated for a cyberpunk context. The thing is, the angel wasn’t born in the egg; rather the egg is an artificial construct, made to store the angel for a time while it was having its mind pumped with generations—literally millions of years—of information, from not just angels but other walks of life. The angels are benign race, but they were not born that way, nor did they become virtuous overnight. Mistakes were made, and the angels are keenly aware that humans now have the means to destroy themselves—to undo civilization in virtually an instant.
Pangborn asks two questions here that have concerned believers for centuries and theologians especially. Can we, as a species, be saved? And also, What is to become of us after we die? Once the body expires, does the human personality persist? Does our spiritual existence continue after death? To be clear, the “total recall” the angel proposes, of Bannerman allowing his memories to be absorbed into the greater consciousness, is not a way of cheating death. Once Bannerman dies he himself will no longer be conscious, and he will not be aware of how his memories may be used thereafter. Of course the angels will not force Bannerman into this. “Recall cannot begin unless the subject is willing or unresisting; to them, that has to mean willing, for any being with intellect enough to make a considered choice.” Total recall is a process that takes several days, in which the person recalling will lose, gradually, their memories, starting at their earliest and moving up to the present, as which point they’ll die, peacefully. This is not suicide. I’m not sure how each Christian sect treats suicide, but my understanding is that the Roman Catholic Church considers suicide a mortal sin. You could be a serial rapist or ax murderer and still be saved if you jump through the necessary hoops, but if you give in to despair and take your own life then your soul is forfeit. There is, however, a difference between taking one’s own life and giving it up. Bannerman is an educated man and a decent man, and the angels consider it a service to both them and humanity if he were to accept the call and give up his life for them.
Back to the Christian allegory. Bannerman has to make the choice between living out the rest of his life as a normal man and sacrificing himself for the good of mankind, and he chooses the latter. Surely it must’ve occurred to Jesus, maybe during those days when he took off for the desert by himself, that it wasn’t too late to turn back—that he could reject his call to save mankind and live like a normal man. But then what would be the cost? “Angel’s Egg” is a powerful narrative, only slightly dampened by the unnecessary coda at the end so as to close out the framing device, because it’s concerned with questions that don’t necessarily apply to believers. I’m not a believer myself, but I’m still at times preoccupied with man’s spiritual destiny—whether the human race deserves to persist. Bannerman trusting the angels and giving up his life is an act of sheer faith. The moral seriousness of it would’ve been most unusual for the time, and that it’s more than a little sentimental does nothing to detract from the bittersweetness nor the power of Bannerman’s final journal entries.
A Step Farther Out
“Angel’s Egg” reads like the work of a veteran at the height of his powers, and while Pangborn had written fiction before, his sudden appearance in the SFF field with this story must’ve come as a shock for some. Here we have a writer who seemingly came out of the womb fully formed, with a vision that can’t quite be easily categorized, nor can it fall comfortably into any one niche. While the framing device and the angels’ psi powers betray the story’s age, it otherwise holds up strongly as a thoughtful allegory and a tale of first contact. Pangborn’s preoccupation with humanity’s capacity for destruction will rear its head in longer works, but it’s memorably put forth here, for the first time, in a story that’s emblematic of the revolution (a seismic change in literary standards for the field that arguably rivals the New Wave) that was happening in genre SF in the early ’50s. It’s a treasure.
Sometimes the topics for these editorials can venture into “serious” territory, but this one is rather frivolous, being about a little footnote in genre history that nobody living today thinks about—probably not even the likes of John Clute. At the same time it’s such an odd footnote that I had to turn it into a thousand-word essay, so sit back and enjoy your coffee while I talk about one of the most important figures in old-timey American SF and how he, if not mostly for circumstance, could’ve been a very fine magazine editor on the level of Ed Ferman or even Anthony Boucher. There were brief spots in the ’50s, in fact, when Knight got the chance to flex his editing muscles—only he got the plug pulled far too early.
Knight, as you know, started out in the ’40s as a critic—arguably the first serious critic in American magazine SFF. He was a bratty 20-something who made no bones about his opinions, and it was also clear that he was a little more “literary” than the average bear, which would put him in the same boat as Brian Aldiss and fellow Futurian James Blish. Reviewers in the field at the time were sometimes accomplished writers who turned to reviewing, such as Boucher and P. Schuyler Miller, but Knight was a reviewer who then turned to writing fiction—almost as a way of proving that he could do himself what he wanted other writers to do. While his criticism is not what Knight is now most known for, he did win a special Hugo in 1956 for his book reviews, and no doubt his astute breaking-down of other people’s work led him to be just as demanding with his own fiction.
Knight’s success in fiction was not immediate, but 1950 would see two of his most famous short stories in print: “Not with a Bang” in the Winter-Spring 1950 issue of F&SF, and “To Serve Man” in the November 1950 issue of Galaxy. These are not works of great depth, but they are memorable and quite functional, being written very much in the O. Henry mode wherein we’re given a setup and a twist payoff in the span of ten pages or less. Knight would write more ambitious stories in subssequent years, but it can’t be denied that 1950 was a watershed year for him—and not just for his most remembered stories. Working as an assistant under Ejler Jakobsson, Knight got a first taste of what editing a magazine was like with the revived Super Science Stories, and this experience seemed to encourage him to strike out on his own and make a magazine in his own image.
Still only 27 when he would’ve begun work on Worlds Beyond, Knight got to start his new magazine with Hillman Periodicals, who, at a time when the SFF magazine market was about to explode, wanted a hit as soon as possible and had no patience when they didn’t get it. Worlds Beyond hit newsstands in November with the December 1950 issue, and for a first issue its contents certainly catch one’s attention. On top of original works by Fredric Brown, Mack Reynolds, C. M. Kornbluth, and future detective fiction heavyweight John D. MacDonald, we have reprints by a couple unusual names such as Franz Kafka and Graham Greene. Knight’s policy with reprints at first looks like he’s taking a cue from F&SF (which had quite a few reprints at the outset), and he probably was—but the choice in authors is telling. Whereas Boucher and McComas picked pre-pulp authors who generally were known for supernatural fiction, Knight picked authors who are not usually associated with genre fiction.
There was another reprint in the first issue of Worlds Beyond that should catch one’s eyes: Jack Vance’s “The Loom of Darkness,” published earlier that year in The Dying Earth as “Liane the Wayfarer.” Vance was still pretty early in his career, and The Dying Earth initially saw very little attention, being a small collection of connected fantasy stories that really did not read like anything else at the time; but clearly Knight was enamored with it. That issue of Worlds Beyond no doubt introduced some readers to the Dying Earth series. Vance would appear again in the February 1951 issue with “Brain of the Galaxy,” reprinted thereafter as “The New Prime.” Another author who clearly appealed to Knight was fellow Futurian C. M. Kornbluth, who also appeared in two of the three issues—although that latter appearance was reprints rather than original fiction.
Worlds Beyond obviously took after F&SF to a degree, but whereas F&SF started out as a “classy” genre outlet with more emphasis put on supernatural fantasy (it was indeed The Magazine of Fantasy initially), Knight was not afraid to print fairly pulpy science fiction if the actual writing—the substance of the work—met his standards. There was about a 50/50 split between original fiction and reprints, and for something that lasted only three issues there’s a disproportionate amount of notable work here, such as Vance’s “The New Prime,” Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm,” Judith Merril’s “Survival Ship,” William Tenn’s “Null-P,” and Harry Harrison’s debut story (he was already active as an illustrator) “Rock Diver.” Knight also ran the book review column for each issue, which makes sense considering he was already perfectly qualified for that job—and anyway Knight’s reviews are often informative, if caustic. This all seems like a recipe for success.
Worlds Beyond might’ve prospered, or at least survived until the market crunch of 1955, if not for Hillman Periodicals seeing the lackluster numbers for the first issue and immediately pulling the plug. The second and third issues were already being printed when the magazine got the ax, so we’re lucky enough to have three issues instead of just one. Still, it must’ve been a blow for Knight, as he would not return to magazine editing for nearly a decade—but thankfully he would return, if only for a short while again. It’s a bit of an odd coincidence that Knight edited two magazines in the ’50s and they both lasted only three issues under his watch; no more, no less. Of course, If was a reasonably ssuccessful magazine before Knight came along and it would persist long after he left, being something of a chameleon, changing colors depending on who’s running the show—for better or worse. Genre historians often make note of how If reinvented itself under Frederik Pohl’s editorship, but its transformation under Knight was almost as radical, as we’re about to see.
(Cover by Ed Emswhiller. If, December 1958.)
For most of the ’50s If was a second-tier magazine that sometimes published very good fiction but otherwise had little to distinguish itself. It began as a pet project for James L. Quinn, published by Quinn’s own company and with him as the editor for most of the decade. If‘s quality under Quinn fluctuated depending on who was working as Quinn’s assistant (i.e., doing much of the heavy lifting) at the time, but in 1958 Quinn let go of the reins (mostly) and gave them to Knight, so that while Quinn still kept an eye on things as the publisher, Knight suddenly had more control of the magazine than if he was “just” an assistant. As with Worlds Beyond, Knight also ran the book review column, which shouldn’t surprive anyone.
The October 1958 issue was the first to have Knight’s name on it, and if we’re being honest it’s a pretty weird issue on its face, just going by the theme. Yes, the October 1958 has a shared theme between the stories, although this was appearently done after the fact (the authors had no intention of their stories connecting somehow) and it was Quinn’s idea, not Knight’s. The idea was that we would get a chronology—let’s call it a future history—of mankind and space flight. It’s an obnoxious gimmick that didn’t actually amount to anything of substance, but there are still a few notable pieces here, including works by A. Bertram Chandler, one of the first stories by Richard McKenna (sadly gone too soon), and one of Cordwainer Smith’s more famous stories, “The Burning of the Brain.” Smith’s piece was part of a future history, but not the cobbled-together one that the issue proposes; instead it’s part of his Instrumentality series.
Something to keep in mind about Smith is that up to this point he had only appeared a few times in the magazines, with his work being a little too eccentric and ambitious for most editors at the time. Indeed his debut story as an adult, “Scanners Live in Vain,” took about five years to see publication, and only then in an obscure little semi-pro called Fantasy Book. Fred Pohl would later take an immense liking to Smith, even calling first dibs on all his work and printing most of it in the ’60s—but before Pohl there was Knight, who must’ve gobbled up whatever Smith had on hand, since every issue of Knight’s If had a Smith story. McKenna also appeared in all three issues, first under “R. M. McKenna” and then under his full name. Other big names include Fritz Leiber, Algis Budrys, Margaret St. Clair, Philip K. Dick, and even an early appearance from David R. Bunch, who would later become much associated with the New Wave.
A rule of thumb with magazines changing editors is that it takes several issues for the new boss to carry about their policy, since they would have a backlog of purchased stories to deal with and, after all, Rome was not built in a day. What’s impressive about Knight’s If is that in only three issues, the magazine was reshaped to fit Knight’s rather quirky parameters, becoming wholly his own by the second issue. The standard of the fiction had gone up, certainly, but combining that with Knight’s review column and his obvious bias with certain authors, I have no doubt that had If kept going like this for even another year or two it could’ve easily surpassed Galaxy, which at this particular point in time was not putting out its best work. H. L. Gold, at one point the finest editor in the field by a considerable margin, had become noticeably fatigued by the end of the ’50s, letting Pohl do a considerable amount of the heavy lifting for him before giving him the reins in light of a car accident that left Gold physically disabled.
Knight would have continued raising the bar for If, but Quinn saw a lack of profits for the magazine and decided to sell it to another publisher, and Knight did not come with the package. It was a loss even more arbitrary than the axing of Worlds Beyond—nothing more than cutthroat publishing industry nonsense. Knight went back to writing fiction, even trying his hand more earnestly at writing novels (not his strong suit), while If skipped what would’ve been the April 1959 issue before returning with the July issue, this time under a worn-out Gold as editor. For those keeping track it must’ve looked like If was on the verge of shutting down unceremoniously before returning in a somewhat regressed state; it would not come even close to the forefront again for several more years. But for a brief moment—all too brief—we got a glimpse of a magazine that started as one step above pulp that could’ve been a real contender.
The experience, of course, was not a total loss: Knight would return to editing again—only this time it was for books, not magazines. The first volume of Orbit appeared in 1966, with Knight expressing a noble mission statement of publishing science fiction that likely would not see print in any of the magazines—fiction that was too experimental, too mature, too literary for magazine editors (in the US, anyway) to touch. The plan worked. The Orbit series saw some very fine work by voices who probably would not have prospered in the magazine market at the time, including Kate Wilhelm, R. A. Lafferty, and most importantly of all, Gene Wolfe, who wrote such memorable stories as “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” and “Seven American Nights” with Knight as both editor and coach. The Orbit series proved the validity of both the New Wave and original anthologiess as an alternative market, and while it did occasionally print nigh unreadable garbage, Knight’s achievement here is hard to overstate.
With that said, I do occasionally think about what we lost…
