We are now knee-deep in spring, which means last month I narrowly survived a fit of allergies. (I’m not really exaggerating, I got hit with what the doctor called postnasal drip, and for some days it was difficult to even breathe, let alone sleep at night.) In terms of weather this might be my least favorite time of year, because of said allergies. In better news, it’s also time for applying for memberships at the yearly Worldcon, if you’re interested. This one is happening in LA, which is unfortunate because it’s the other side of the country for me and I don’t have any connections who live close enough to where the action’s happening. I have a few friends in California, but as you know, California is a big state. (That’s not even getting into people from outside the US who want to attend in person. It’s rough.) I did end up getting a WSFS membership, I think for the third year in a row. I mainly do this for all the free stuff you get, a very good I would say given it’s only $50. You get ebooks of novels and short fiction, and you even get files for the movies up for Best Dramatic Presentation.
As for what we’ll be reading this month, for the first time in a long while we have a complete novel, which I have to get around to this time. (Unlike last time.) We also have a novel in serialized form, by someone whom I’m sure will not raise any eyebrows. Incidentally, two of the stories here are related to World War II, although one was written on the eve of the war in Europe while the other is an early example of a “Hitler wins” alternate history. Such a scenario is pretty tired today, but it was not so when C. M. Kornbluth came up with it back in the ’50s. Another funny connection is that both Kornbluth and L. Ron Hubbard served in WWII, the former in the army and the latter in the navy. Hubbard’s time in the navy was respectable, and I’m sure nothing untoward or embarrassing happened when he was at sea. Unfortunately for Kornbluth, his time in the army caused a weakness in his heart that would later see him die quite young.
Anyway…
We have one story from the 1940s, two from the 1950s, one from the 1980s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.
For the serial:
Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, April to June 1940. Where do we even start with Hubbard? One of the most controversial figures in not just SF but also modern religion and pseudo-science. Hubbard had Dianetics published in 1950, and in 1952 he founded the Church of Scientology, one of the most successful (if only because of the disproportionate number of rich people in its ranks) cults in recorded history. Before all that, he was a fairly respected genre writer, with the late ’30s and early ’40s marking his peak for both quality and quantity. Final Blackout is probably the most well-received of Hubbard’s SF novels, after the much more famous but also more controversial Battlefield Earth.
For the novellas:
“The Giants of the Violet Sea” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. From the September-October 2021 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Born and raised in Greece, and indeed currently living there, Triantafyllou writes her fiction in English. Her personal website says she has “a flair for dark things.” She made her debut in 2017, and so far has only written short fiction. This here novella is the longest work of Triantafyllou’s to have been published up to that point.
“Two Dooms” by C. M. Kornbluth. From the July 1958 issue of Venture Science Fiction. Kornbluth is maybe one of my favorite SF writers to have really flourished during the ’50s magazine boom-and-bust, although he had made his debut long before that. He was a prodigy whose earliest work was published when he was a literal teenager. Unfortunately he also died very young, at just 34, from a weak heart, robbing the field of one of its most incisive writers.
For the short stories:
“The Persecutor’s Tale” by John M. Ford. From the November 1982 issue of Amazing Stories. Speaking of very good writers gone too soon, Ford also made his debut when only in his teens, but he picked up on the trade pretty quickly. A writer’s writer, the best way to read a Ford novel is the read it twice. Sadly he died in 2006, at just 49, having not quite completed his final novel.
“Always” by Karen Joy Fowler. From the April-May 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Nebula winner for Best Short Story. Believe it or not, there’s an L. Ron Hubbard connection here. Fowler is maybe the most high-profile author to have made her debut in the annual (and Scientology-backed) Writers of the Future anthology series, although Fowler herself is not a Scientologist.
For the complete novel:
The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett. From the February 1953 issue of Space Stories. While Brackett’s first few stories were published in Astounding, she soon moved to other magazines that were more open to her brand of space adventure SF. By the end of World War II she’d come to be associated most with Planet Stories, in a mutually beneficial relationship. Indeed, after Edgar Rice Burroughs, Brackett can be considered the leading writer of planetary romance. She married fellow writer Edmond Hamilton in 1946, but they almost never collaborated. Nowadays she’s best known as a successful screenwriter, and for her grounded SF novel The Long Tomorrow, which is quite different from what she most often wrote. The Big Jump is a short novel, apparently published in magazine form unabridged, and later as one half of an Ace Double along with Philip K. Dick’s Solar Lottery.
As you probably don’t know, I’m voting in this year’s Hugos, which makes it the second consecutive time I’ve done this. I’ll be brutally honest and say I get the supporting membership for all the free goodies it comes with more so than to take part in the grueling and overcrowded popularity contest that is the Hugos. One major plus, aside from the free stuff and indeed the thing that comes with all that free stuff, is that I’m finally given an excuse to dip my toes in more recent SFF. See, an unspoken rule of my site is that a story has to be at least one year (twelve months) old for me to consider it, since when it comes to literature I prefer to let the art marinate in the broth of time first before getting a taste of it. It’s a weird bias of mine that goes back to when I first started reading casually as a youngling, I can’t really explain it. Eugenia Triantafyllou’s “Loneliness Universe” is a Hugo finalist this year for Best Novelette, and it had already gotten a Nebula nomination. I’d been meaning to read some Triantafyllou for a minute, but have not been able to. I don’t really have an excuse. Triantafyllou is one of the most acclaimed short story writers in the field right now (she has not written a novel, at least as of yet), and like many other authors currently working she’s the sort of talent who probably had a tough go at it a few decades ago. The internet and especially online magazines have made it easier for people from outside the Anglosphere (Triantafyllou is from Greece, as she’ll have you know) to get their foot in the door, and this is very much a good thing. Despite being born and raised in Greece, Triantafyllou has pulled a Joseph Conrad and writes her fiction in English.
Now, I did not know, when I posted my review forecast on the first day of this month, that ON THE SAME DAY James Wallace Harris would post his review of this same story, so that “Loneliness Universe” is getting covered at least twice in the span of two weeks. I can say what drew me to this story, but I can’t say what would draw other people. It’s not perfect (I spotted a malapropism, and also a factual inaccuracy that distracted me), but its basic conceit is compelling enough that I’ve been stuck thinking about it for the past couple days. It’s also only nominally SFnal, really using an SFnal premise as a diving board for allegory rather than investigating a scientific phenomenon. It’s SF of such a mushy softness that it almost feels like fantasy, but this is a human narrative about a uniquely human state of mind that is sadly becoming all more commonplace. Fair warning: I’ll be talking about my autism, bouts of depression, and suicidal ideation with this one, since it’s that kind of story. It’s less that “Loneliness Universe” is exceptionally dark or bleak and more that Triantafyllou does a good job of pinpointing something I’ve been feeling for years now.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May-June issue of Uncanny Magazine, so it’s just old enough for me to have considered for review. So far it has not been reprinted anywhere, but I’m sure that’ll change soon.
Enhancing Image
We start at the ending, with an email Nefeli sends to her old friend Cara, after the two tried but failed to meet in person, after years of silence between them. Nefeli’s wondering, after the fact, if their attempt at reconnecting would’ve worked out if not for the universe quite literally preventing them from occupying the same space. “But we’ll never know. Because despite what the scientists may say, I believe I broke the universe by coming to find you.” That last part’s probably not true, but Nefeli was patient zero for what turned out to be a world-spanning phenomenon. We’re given a general idea as to how things turned out, but Triantafyllou only gives us the details piece by piece. Some stories are a whodunnit, some are a howdidit, but “Loneliness Universe” is very much a howdidwegethere. In that sense it’s a hard story to spoil since we’re told upfront that shit’s not gonna work out—the question then being how they don’t work out. There is, of course, a big difference between having a very good meal set at your table and seeing the chef and his assistants work on said meal. The process is at least as important as the result. Indeed the process of making art (which includes cooking) is the art. So how did we get here?
Reconnecting with old friends after months or years of nothing is usually awkward, because (often correctly) there’s the sense that the part wanting to reconnect also wants something in return. What is there to say after the relationship had seemingly fizzled and reached its natural conclusion. Usually people just drift apart, or maybe it was an argument that did it. Nefeli and Cara are two old friends in Greece who had drifted apart, under, it must be said, less than ideal circumstances; but now Nefeli sees a chance to rekindle their friendship. The internet was in its toddler stage before (“the pre-internet days were rough”), but since the proliferation of social media the two have reconnected in their twenties (I feel old since they’re a few years younger than me), agreeing to meet up at a spot. What could go wrong? Quite a few things, although what goes wrong is something neither of them could’ve possibly predicted. Each thinks the other has stood her up, but no, they’re at the same place—just not the same version of that place. Like layers of film overlapping when one’s in the editing room. Nefeli and Cara are sitting on the same bench, at the same time, but they’re not occupying the same space. This is a problem. Soon enough it also applies to Nefeli’s brother, Antonis, whom she’s living with. Speaking of which, this story takes place over the course of a few months in 2015, and we know this because the emails Nefeli sends are dated; but otherwise you wouldn’t know it takes place in 2015, not helped by Antonis at one point mentioning he had a PS5, which wouldn’t come out for five more years. I have to assume this was a flub on Triantafyllou’s part.
(Remember 2015? A lot has happened since then. We didn’t worry about wearing masks in public. House of Cards was the biggest show on Netflix. Louis C.K. was a respected comedian. Vine was a thing. Elon Musk was just another “eccentric” rich asshole. The apparatus of neo-liberal capitalist “democracy” in the US was on shaky ground but didn’t look like it would crumble and give way to a kind of blue-collar trade-union-endorsed fascism propped up by technocracy.)
I’m actually not sure what the purpose of making “Loneliness Universe” a sort of period piece was; it could be that setting it in the present would’ve dated it much more severely, especially given that things (by that I mean mostly bad things) seem to be happening at a much faster pace now. Time itself seems to be moving differently. The internet has been changing our perception of time for about the past three decades, only doing more so with Web 3.0 and the more drastic splintering of the web. We know this because possibly the biggest precursor to “Loneliness Universe,” although not necessarily an influence (I don’t know if Triantafyllou has seen it), is the 2001 Japanese horror movie Pulse. Without giving away the third act of that movie, the premise is basically that ghosts are making their way into the world of the living through the internet, which sounds silly on paper, but in execution ends up being quite haunting. The world becomes more devoid of human life, being replaced by these static-filled entities that wander about the landscape, forever separated from every other one of their kind. The ghosts are not happy to be here, nor are they even really malevolent, but they’re isolated. To somewhat paraphrase a line from that movie, “Death is eternal loneliness.” Nefeli is first separated from her old friend, then her brother, then her parents, then everyone close to her in her life—except through the internet. Emails, text messages, an online game called TinyCastle they play together. But she’s unable to interact with these people in-person, and this is only the beginning.
However, being an undiagnosed (it’s hard to blame me, given current circumstances in the US, for not getting diagnosed as an adult) autistic person, I’ve been living with a more mild version of Nefeli’s situation for pretty much my whole life. Indeed, anyone who’s autistic and/or clinically depressed (and I’m both of those) can tell you that they already live day to day with this weird sense of disconnection from other people—a disconnection that’s easier to cope with over text and other online activities, but which becomes unbearable in-person. It must be tempting, if you’re a neurotypical, to see the dysfunction autistics experience as a result of the internet, or some other stupid reason (it’s painfully clear to me that a lot of neurotypicals see autism as some disease that must be cured, or prevented by way of eugenics), but really there’ve been autistic people for centuries. Really the paradox of the internet (that it allows people from different countries and even continents to connect with each other, while also balkanizing the same people into little niche groups and interests) has been fostering a dissonance in the minds of neurotypicals which people with autism have had to deal with since at least the time of Shakespeare. Yeah, you people get mad at us if our tone is even a bit “off” in public spaces, and then you wonder why we retreat into online chat rooms and game lobbies for acceptance. It’s not much of a mystery, ya know. I think what gives “Loneliness Universe” its power, despite my gripes with it, is that it allegorizes something that most people would otherwise have only the faintest idea of, that being the growing entropy someone like me senses every day—the theoretically infinite drifting-apart of time and space.
There Be Spoilers Here
“The scientists” (it’s pretty vague as to what this phenomenon is, not like it needed to be specific) are theorizing that the universe is operating in a wax-wane cycle, so that hopefully, before too long, people will start living on the same dimensional level again. Assuming it happens in the first place. For all Nefeli knows the universe will just get more and more spaced out, until everyone is like the ghosts in Pulse, forever separated from everyone else. We don’t know if things get better; the story ends on a rather open note. But then of course we had already seen the ending. What had started with Nefeli is now happening with everyone else. It doesn’t really make sense if you try to look at it scientifically, but it does make sense on an emotional level, because some of us are already living through this. When I said “Loneliness Universe” is only nominally SF, that’s what I mean; it’s only SF by virtue of not being a “realistic” story and at the same time it’s not a straightforward ghost story, although it kinda is one. It’s a techno-ghost story in which the ghosts are still alive, in that they are the living dead, and so are we by extension. We’re the living dead.
A Step Farther Out
Sorry that this has been bleak. Actually I’m not sorry. I would’ve written my review yesterday, but I was busy “crashing out,” as the current lingo has it. I laid in my bed for nearly an hour resisting the urge to head to the kitchen, take out one of my knives, and harm myself. I felt completely alone in the world, and it was not the first nor will it be the last time I get this feeling. I really hate it here. For what it’s worth, I do recommend “Loneliness Universe,” but it’s a lot. It’s supposed to be a lot. Sometimes we need art that makes us feel like shit.
At the beginning of the year I said that I would be covering one short story or novella from Galaxy each month—but I said nothing about serials. The truth is that Galaxy was, alongside Astounding/Analog, the most consistent market for serialized novels and novellas at the time, so it would feel wrong to never acknowledge that part of the magazine’s history. As such we’re getting a novella and a serial from Galaxy this month; that they’re both from authors I admire probably helps.
Last month I covered a horror story by the crime/mystery author Dorothy Salisbury Davis, which gave me the idea of finding more SFF by people who normally write crime/mystery, which while also a genre that has a history in pulp magazines, is “realistic” fiction rather than SFF. One curiosity that struck me ever since I saw it years ago was the fantasy story “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler, which marked one of only two times he appeared in an SFF magazine. Someone who wrote a good deal more SFF than Chandler would be John D. MacDonald, who wrote prolifically for the genre magazines in the late ’40s and early ’50s before shifting to crime fiction and making a killing on that. So for this month’s complete novel we’ve got the early MacDonald novel Wine of the Dreamers. Rounding out the novel-length stuff is a relatively obscure standalone SF novel by Roger Zelazny, who nowadays is more known for his fantasy.
For the women we have two people who are a few generations apart and coming from different continents, but who still, each in her own way, have come to write science fiction. Kate Wilhelm is actually a bit hard to find in magazines after the late ’60s, once she found her voice as a writer, but the September 2001 issue of F&SF was a special issue dedicated to Wilhelm, complete with a new novella. As for the Greek writer Eugenia Triantafyllou, I picked just about the newest story I reasonably could’ve (an unofficial rule of mine is that a story must be at least a year old for me to consider it for review), with “Loneliness Universe” being a finalist in this year’s Hugos. I’m voting in the Hugos, by the way.
That makes one story from the 1930s, two from the 1950s, two from the 1970s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.
For the serial:
The Dream Millennium by James White. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1973. I’ve been meaning to read more James White, and thankfully several of his novels first appeared as serials. White first appeared in the UK, in New Worlds, before eventually finding some success in the US as well. Along with Bob Shaw he was one of the few Irish SF writers to appear regularly on both sides of the Atlantic back in those days.
Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, June to August 1975. Zelazny is one of the most influential SFF writers of all time, his mark being apparent on the likes of George R. R. Martin and (God help us) Neil Gaiman; and yet despite a couple generations of writers (especially those of fantasy) owing a debt to Zelazny, much of his work remains obscure or simply out of print, including this standalone novel.
For the novellas:
“Yesterday’s Tomorrows” by Kate Wilhelm. From the September 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s easy to forget this, but Wilhelm started in the ’50s, only that she flew under the radar for about a decade. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, though, Wilhelm seemed to metamorphize almost overnight into one of the most acclaimed SF authors from the late ’60s until her death in 2018. She was married to Damon Knight.
“The Other Man” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the September 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Sturgeon is one of my favorite authors, especially of short fiction. Sturgeon had started to write professionally with “mainstream” fiction, although this went nowhere and he quickly pivoted to SFF, much to our benefit. His productivity was peaks and valleys so that he was writing either a lot or nothing at all. He was most consistently productive in the ’50s.
For the short stories:
“Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. From the May-June 2024 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novelette. Triantafyllou was born and raised in Greece, and continues to live abroad, but writes her fiction in English. She made her debut back in 2017, and has yet to write her first novel, although maybe she just much prefers writing short fiction.
“The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler. From the November 1939 issue of Unknown. Possibly the most acclaimed crime writer of the 20th century, seriously only rivaled by Agatha Christie, Chandler’s known for his series of novels starring Philip Marlowe. Chandler famously didn’t start writing crime fiction until he was in his forties, and didn’t write his first novel until he was pushing fifty.
For the complete novel:
Wine of the Dreamers by John D. MacDonald. From the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories. Fans of crime fiction would know MacDonald for his prolific (21 novels over a span of as many years) Travis McGee series, as well as the standalone novel Cape Fear (first titled The Executioners, but then retitled after the 1962 film adaptation), but he also wrote a good deal of science fiction in the late ’40s and early ’50s. It’s not unusual for authors to cut their teeth on working with one genre before moving to greener pastures, so that much like how Elmore Leonard started with Westerns before moving to crime fiction, the same happened with MacDonald. Wine of the Dreamers was either MacDonald’s first or second novel, it’s hard to say.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 