Who Goes There?

Edward Bryant was born in New York, but raised in Wyoming and even went to college there; and it was the latter’s desolate landscape that very much inspired today’s story. Bryant made his professional debut in 1970, just as the New Wave was hitting its peak before going downhill, such that he would be one of the more acclaimed post-New Wave writers of the ’70s. He never wrote a novel solo, although he did collaborate on a few; but it was the short story that Bryant was really keen on, such that he managed to win back-to-back Nebulas for “Stone” and “giANTS.” Similarly “Strata” also garnered a Nebula nomination. Bryant also has, I suppose you could say the honor of having a hitherto unpublished story appear in The Last Dangerous Visions, although whether the wait was worth it or not is unclear. Bryant died in 2017, and The Last Dangerous Visions came out in 2024. While known for his SF, Bryant also wrote his fair share of horror; he did, after all, appear in the seminal horror anthology Dark Forces. “Strata” is an SF-horror hybrid, albeit leaning more into the latter genre.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was then reprinted in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Tenth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), A Spadeful of Spacetime (ed. Fred Saberhagen), Fantasy Annual IV (ed. Terry Carr), Dinosaurs! (ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois), Strange Dreams (ed. Stephen R. Donaldson), and the Bryant collections Wyoming Sun and Particle Theory.

Enhancing Image

“Strata” is a novelette, but feels shorter and smaller in scale than it is, which is mostly a good thing. I have to admit that the first few pages made me worry, since I think Bryant gets us started on the wrong foot, namely with the problem that the opening is loaded with exposition, most of which will turn out to be quite unnecessary. We’re introduced to a group of four friends, who in a flashback are celebrating their high school graduation: Steve Mavrakis, Carroll Dale (“It became second nature early on to explain to people first hearing her given name that it had two r’s and two I’s.”), Paul Onoda, and Ginger McClelland. Steve is our POV character, more or less, so it’d be fair to call him the protagonist, although he’s not a hero by any means—not to say he’s an anti-hero, but rather he’s mostly an average dude who’s also heavily implied to be autistic. Paul is the only non-white member of the group, being Japanese-American, and indeed his parents had spent time in an internment camp during World War II. There are implications with how Bryant uses Paul as the token non-white character that I don’t like, or which at least show the story’s age, but I at least understand the symbolic purpose behind using someone who comes from a persecuted racial minority. This is a story about the ugly side of American history, namely racism and colonialism, indeed the side of this country’s history that continues to reverberate in the present. It’s also a story about the baby boomers, of which Bryant and his characters are members, and how this generation, which would have come of age in the ’60s and ’70s, ran into a certain problem.

On the night of their graduation, the four kids ran into something, while hanging out and “necking” right outside Shoshoni, which I found out is a real town in Wyoming (I also recently discovered that human beings do in fact live in Wyoming, albeit not many), although it’s not something any of them can easily describe. While Paul is the token POC of the group, Steve is the token neurodivergant member, which seems to give him supernatural powers not too unlike Stephen King’s shining; his dreams are strange, even by the standards of most dreams, and no doubt they have a prophetic quality to them. Steve is shown to have a keen intelligence, but is reported as being a mediocre student, and he also has trouble interacting with people. How he then grew up to become a journalist I’m not sure. The writing of autistic characters and characters with various mental illnesses has a long and rather bleak history, since the public treatment of people with such conditions has only become to improve relatively recently, and those who have written on such persons are mostly looking from inside a glass house. It’s not unusual for neurodivergant characters in classic literature to be depicted as different in a way that implies the supernatural, one of the most famous (or infamous) examples being Benji Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, who seems to experience the past and present simultaneously. Similarly when Steve has visions of the prehistoric past bleeding into the canyons of present-day Wyoming it’s like a layer of film superimposed on top of another. The most memorable and eerie of these visions, which naturally happens during one of his dreams, is Steve imagining himself as an animal with fins instead of hands. This is strange at first, but it only gets stranger when the four friends reunite fifteen years later.

The canyons of Wyoming are haunted, although by what is unclear at first. “Strata” attempts, through some exposition on Paul’s part, to provide an SFnal explanation for the things the four friends see, but it’s ultimately a ghost story; there are ghosts in the quite literal sense, but there’s also the ghost of the American frontier’s bloody past. I can see why this got a Nebula nomination, less so for the execution, which I find to be a bit clunky, and more for the ideas Bryant plays with; he’s hunting some intellectual big game here, although I think the story could’ve used another draft. Steve and company run afoul of malign spirits, although they’re not the spirits of dead indigenous peoples, but instead animal life that lived in this part of the country (although, as Steve points out, it would’ve been an ocean depending on the time period) over a hundred million years ago. In particular there’s what seems to be unnamed ancient marine reptile, large, carnivorous, and with big fins, which stalks the group. I had heard this was a story that involves dinosaurs, which I can now say is a bit misleading, not least because ancient marine reptiles were not dinosaurs. We also see at one point what looks to be a pterosaur, which mind you is also not a dinosaur. Bryant does something curious in that he clearly wants us to think of these ghostly animals as stand-ins for the wrong indigenous people who still live in that region of the country; meanwhile the actual indigenous people Steve and company come across remain on the margins of the story, barely mentioned, let alone given a chance to connect explicitly with the ghosts. But while textually something is lacking, subtextually what Bryant wants us to think about still worms into our minds.

Bryant and his characters are boomers, in the proper sense that they were born around or following the end of World War II, with Bryant himself being born about a week before Japan surrendered. The boomers are now typically derided by members of younger generations for being exceedingly selfish, short-sighted, and unwilling to take responsibility for how they may have negatively impact the world. Whereas the silent generation grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression, the boomers were born into an America which was rapidly on its way to becoming the world’s leading superpower, and with an economy and expanding middle class to show for it. World War II was a pyrrhic victory for the British empire, which came out of the war more or less in shambles, and having to resort to a kind of soft coddling welfare-socialism in order to rebuild itself. The Soviet Union came out second place, having fought back the Nazis in an impressive show of force, albeit suffering almost inconceivable losses of life in the process, showcasing a very different (and much more brutal) kind of socialism from the British. So the US became, almost overnight, the crowning beacon of capitalism for all the world to see. The boomers, growing up, probably thought this prosperity (for white people, anyway) would last forever—the only problem, at least according to a lot of boomers, being that it didn’t. The dream had, at some point, been pawned, and for what? It’s a problem that lurks in the minds of Bryant and his characters, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “Strata” is about boomers who would not only have come of age but would been in their early-to-mid thirties.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s ambiguous just how much the ghosts are able to interact with the world of the living. At one point we see a deer that’s been bisected, but we’re not sure what did it; could’ve been a car, or it could’ve been something else. The encounter with the giant marine reptile in the climax is also ambiguously framed, but nevertheless the car goes offroad and crashes, and Paul dies as a result, his neck “all wrong.” Indeed something must have gone wrong a long time ago, for the spirits of the dead in this region to be so vicious. The survivors at the end are left wondering if they’re in some way responsible for the hauntings of the land, or if there’s even still time to turn back. The land has had its vengeance, not for the first time and probably not for the last time either. It’s an ominous ending, somewhat ambiguous, which I think sends off the story on a much stronger note than how it started. Paul dying and leaving the lily-white characters to fend for themselves leaves sort of a bad taste in my mouth, but this might’ve been intentional.

A Step Farther Out

I liked thinking about this one more than I liked reading it, which may or may not be a good thing considering you might spend more time thinking about something than reading it.

See you next time.