Tag: evelyn e. smith

Short Story Review: “The Princess and the Physicist” by Evelyn E. Smith

March 18th, 2025

(Cover by Kirberger. Galaxy, June 1955.)

Who Goes There?

What do we know about Evelyn E. Smith? She was born in 1922 and died in 2000, so she lived a pretty long time. She was apparently a lifelong New York denizen. She had a spurt of productivity with writing short stories in the ’50s, but by the mid-’60s had given up short fiction in favor of novels. The last years of her life were spent writing a series of mystery novels, starring Miss Melville. Given that she wrote a couple non-fiction books on witchcraft and spiritualism (under a pseudonym), and that such things figure into some of her short fiction, it’s possible that like her close contemporary Margaret St. Clair she may have converted to neo-paganism. I’m not sure. Her short SF and fantasy has rarely been collected over the years, and seems to be in enough neglect that much of it has fallen out of copyright. This is all a shame, because from what I’ve read of Smith she was one of the funniest SFF writers of the ’50s, having the sharpness of wit and enough silliness that she fell right in with other satirists of the period such as Robert Sheckley and C. M. Kornbluth. It would make sense, then, that more than half of her short stories appeared in Galaxy and its short-lived sister magazine Beyond Fantasy Fiction. Being a New Yorker with an irreverence for post-war societal norms, she was just the kind of writer H. L. Gold wanted. Her work still remains to be given the reevaluation it deserves.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1955 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It would not appear in book form until Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957) (editor not credited), in 2022. I mentioned that many of Smith’s stories have fallen out of copyright, and “The Princess and the Physicist” is one of them. You can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Centuries ago, spacefaring humans came to the secluded planet of Uxen, which had been home to only a single sentient lifeform: Zen. Zen the Terrible, Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the Encyclopedic, etc. Smith tells this story from the perspective of Zen, who is a corporeal and quasi-omniscient being who, despite technically having a body, we get few descriptions of. When the human settlers came, they struck a deal with Zen, such that the lonesome alien would basically do their bidding—a deal he ended up not being too happy about. Since then, the culture on Uxen seems to have evolved into a cross between steampunk (I’m specifically thinking the world of Final Fantasy VI) and medieval, despite the presence of spaceships. There’s a monarchy, complete with a king and the king’s beautiful daughter, Iximi, along with a religious faction. The Uxenach have only a loose connection with Earth, with an Earth ship only coming in on occasion; but still, there are murmurings of wanting independence from Earth, which Iximi is even sympathetic to. Two Earth scientists, Alpheus Kendrick ~~Lamar~~ and his assistant Peter Hammond, are the latest visitors, who are looking to stay for a time with their robot servamt.

Soon we have a battle of wills, between the princess, the scientists, and Zen, who as a third party looks upon the situation and wonders if there might be something for him in all this. The king explains to the scientists that Zen is “Uxen’s own particular, personal and private god,” which is his way of saying Zen is their almighty errand boy. Smith satirizes the relationships societies have with their dominant religious beliefs: she posits that had the God of Abraham been corporeal and able to speak at any time, it’s unlikely that his worshipers would treat him all too well. Tons of people being needy, and complaining about goddamn everything. And yet, it’s not all bad. Society on Uxen has, over the course of almost countless generations, built up a belief system around Zen, who after all is an alien and not really a god. Indeed he’s like one of those energy beings that show up a little too often in Star Trek; there are so many different races in the Star Trek universe that are semi-corporeal, with reality-warping powers, that one sometimes wonders how said universe has not collapsed in on itself. Where Zen came from is, perhaps wisely, never answered; he may well be the only member of his race. Something else that goes unexplained is how the Uxenach practice their religion, since they have their own little quirks and ways of respecting (or paying begrudging homage) their deity, including salutes for different contexts such as “the secular xa” and “the high xa,” which Smith does not describe. It’s a nicely set-up world wherein Smith doesn’t linger on anything not directly related to the plot. I also somehow doubt that someone who believes in an all-merciful and all-loving God would have written a story this ambivalent about religious practices.

“The Princess and the Physicist” is a short novelette, actually shorter than I was expecting, and it does fly by quickly. The plot is simple: the Uxenach sabotage the scientists’ robot so that they have no choice but to take on a local for the role, which they’re justifiably ambivalent about. Thus Iximi will pose as a beautiful local girl in the hopes that the scientists hire her so that she may spy on them. There’s a pretty funny scene in which the scientists are judging the women who’ve applied for the job, and Kendrick points out that someone as prim and proper as Iximi would probably make a poor housekeeper, since her beauty and neatness imply she is not used to doing the unforgiving work of looking after a couple of slobs. Guj, the prime minister of Uxen, tries desperately to convince the scientists to take in Iximi, which eventually works out, although it ends up not being that simple, what with Zen also having conflicting loyalties. On the one hand he admires the scientists for their reverence and lack of neediness with him, but he also figures that if the Uxenach don’t get their way then that’ll become his problem as well. One thing Zen really likes that the Earthmen have brought with them is tobacco, which if smoked provides a nice “incense.” While Zen spends much of his time as like a fly on a wall, he still has needs, ya know. There’ve been notable examinations of man’s relationship with gods and godlike figures via genre fiction, from Star Trek to (God help us) American Gods, but a more accurate title for “The Princess and the Physicist” would’ve been “God Needs Prayer.” The princess and scientists, while important, are still only secondary to the grumpy alien that watches over them. It’s a lot of fun. This is a pessimistic but not too serious satire about a petty god and his equally petty followers.

There Be Spoilers Here

Turns out the assistant, Peter Hammond, had figured out quickly that something was off about the princess, by virtue of—get this—seeing a portrait of her in the kingdom’s hallways prior to the hiring. Iximi admits her cover was a pretty easy one to blow. The good news is that Kendrick, despite his appearance of being smart and learned, is actually quite slow on the uptake. Even better news is that Hammond only mentions this after Iximi infiltrates the scientists’ lodging because he sympathizes with the people’s wish to be rid of Earth influence. In a moment that I have to admit feels implausible, and which I would take bigger issue with if the story wasn’t a comedy, the princess and the physicist admit both their love for each other and their loyalty to cause of independence. This last stretch of the story is pretty abrupt, which does make me wish it were longer, more fleshed out. Just a little bit. Zen also steps in and proposes an ultimatum with the young lovers, so that the independence of Uxen benefits him as well. What we then have is a kind of satirical recreation of bits from the Old Testament, in which God agrees with the Israelites to have six days of work, followed by a day of rest. In the case of Zen and the young lovers the idea is that the people of Uxen will have to work without Zen’s intervention for six days, and then on the seventh (actually it’s a Thursday), Zen will do whatever his followers ask. It seems like a fair deal.

A Step Farther Out

When I reviewed Smith’s “The Agony of the Leaves” last year, I bemoaned the fact that it was the first story of hers I had read, and that I ought to check out more of her stuff. Sadly I’ve not done this very much, in no small part because collections of her work (her stories were never collected in her lifetime, despite how long she had lived() are not exactly easy to find. Incidentally “The Agony of the Leaves” and “The Princess and the Physicist” appear in the same anthology. However, enough of her short fiction is on Project Gutenberg that you could do a crash course if you really wanted. And you probably should. Smith was pretty funny, in a kind of proto-feminist way that her male peers were not.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: March 2025

March 1st, 2025
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, March 1956.)

Let’s talk about where genre SF was at in 1950, because this year, perhaps more than any other year in the field’s history barring maybe 1926 (the launch of Amazing Stories) and 1953 (the year the magazine market reached critical mass). Changes in the field tend to come gradually; it’s not like, for example, one day you have a market that’s 95% WASPs and then the next it’s much more racially diverse. These things happen in movements, like the rest of history, or indeed like the waxing and waning of the tide. There really was a profound difference between how genre SF looked at the beginning of 1950 and how it looked by the end of the year. There were multiple changes happening at once, and not all of them were good. The less said about Dianetics the better. But you also had the publications of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, two “novels” (they’re really short story collections) that not only garnered acclaim from the usual suspects but even managed to break into the mainstream. This was practically unheard of at the time, to have science fiction that “normal” readers admitted to caring about. 1950 also saw the publication of other major SF books, like Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, Theodore Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels, A. E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky, and the book version of Hal Clement’s Needle. Notice that with the exception of the van Vogt book, all the ones I just mentioned were aimed at younger readers—as in teenagers, those who might grow up to be SF enthusiasts.

A revolution, of a sort, was happening.

In the world of the genre magazines, things were shaking up at least much, even putting Dianetics aside. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which had launched in the fall of 1949, was finding its footing. There were signs of the coming deluge of new magazines, on top of the current rivals to Astounding, and the biggest of these new arrivals, by far, was Galaxy Science Fiction. Galaxy first hit newsstands with its October 1950 issue, which means it would’ve been available in September. Under the editorship of H. L. Gold, who had already proved himself a capable writer, this was a magazine that would do what Astounding could not, namely be socially conscious, with a focus on science fiction that was rather urbane and literate, while still being very much focused on science. But whereas Astounding was all about the hard sciences, Galaxy would focus just as much on the soft sciences, such as psychology and sociology. Being more socially conscious, there would also thus be much more of a focus on social satire, and one stereotype that would come to haunt Galaxy in the ’50s is that too many of its story would be misanthropic hehe-haha comedy pieces, aimed at the middle-class urbanites it was satirizing. As with The New Yorker around the same time (and indeed The New Yorker now), Galaxy ran the risk of coming off as incessantly liberal and middle-brow. This is a legitimate criticism, but it was also a risk one had to accept when changing the field this radically. To this day a lot of SF being published seemingly either takes after Galaxy under Gold’s editorship or Asimov’s Science Fiction under Gardner Dozois’s. There’s a third, more conservative (because Galaxy was kinda “woke” for its day) brand of SF writing that wants desperately to turn back the clock to a pre-Galaxy world, to a time before white people cared about things like social justice, but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

I had to think really hard about what stories and authors to cover this month, because the truth is that Galaxy at its peak had individual issues whose sheer quality and star power would put whole novels to shame. Nearly every story in a given issue would be a banger, or at least a fine read. There are people who wrote for Galaxy during its first decade that I had to leave behind, at least for the moment, including Theodore Sturgeon, Margaret St. Clair, Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, Cordwainer Smith, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, and many others. But still we have a mix of usual suspects, as in those who regularly contributed to the magazine during this time, as well as a few lesser known authors. Of course I couldn’t have it all be now-famous selections.

Anyway, for the stories:
1. “Self Portrait” by Bernard Wolfe. From the November 1951 issue. If Wolfe is little known in the field, it could be because he wrote very little SF, putting out only one SF novel and a handful of short stories. Wolfe was a trained psychologist who also was a committed leftist, specifically a Trotskyist; he even knew the man himself personally, in the years right before Trotsky’s assassination.
2. “The Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean. From the September 1952 issue. I’ve covered MacLean before, actually not too long ago, but seeing as how her most prolific era was when she wrote for Galaxy in the ’50s, why not? She lived a very long time, although she didn’t write that much, making her debut in Astounding in 1949 before (for the most part) switching over to Galaxy.
3. “A Bad Day for Sales” by Fritz Leiber. From the July 1953 issue. Leiber is one of my favorite writers of old-timey SF, although he was also quite skilled (maybe even more so) in fantasy and horror. He debuted in 1939, and thus was one of the old guard, but he adapted to changes in the market with a chameleon’s touch. I picked this story specifically on a friend’s strong recommendation.
4. “The Big Trip Up Yonder” by Kurt Vonnegut. From the January 1954 issue. Vonnegut is one of those few authors who needs no introduction, but here it goes. He broke onto the scene in 1952 with his novel Player Piano, which was SF, as would be about half of his other novels. Despite not wanting to be pigeonholed as a “sci-fi” writer, he also occasionally appeared in the genre magazines.
5. “The Princess and the Physicist” by Evelyn E. Smith. From the June 1955 issue. We don’t know a lot about Smith, which unfortunately is not unusual for women in pre-New Wave SF, and incidentally she had mostly stepped away from the field by the time the New Wave and second-wave feminism kicked in. In the ’50s she wrote by far the most prolifically for Gold’s magazines.
6. “A Gun for Dinosaur” by L. Sprague de Camp. From the March 1956 issue. As with Leiber, de Camp was perhaps more adept at writing fantasy than SF, but then in the ’50s there wasn’t much of a demand for the former. He too was of the old guard, and was able to adapt to the changing times. He also lived an extremely long time, indeed having one of the longest careers in the field.
7. “Prime Difference” by Alan E. Nourse. From the June 1957 issue. Nourse is one of the lesser known of the original “hard” SF writers, and indeed the vast majority of his short fiction appeared in the ’50s when he was a very young man. He mostly stopped writing SF probably because he got a very well-paying job as a trained physician, but his work remains to be rediscovered.
8. “Nightmare with Zeppelins” by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. From the December 1958 issue. Pohl and Kornbluth were good friends for many years, but in the ’50s they collaborated on several novels and short stories, the most famous being The Space Merchants. Sadly Kornbluth died in early 1958, making “Nightmare with Zeppelins” one of the last stories he would’ve finished.
9. “The Man in the Mailbag” by Gordon R. Dickson. From the April 1959 issue. Dickson was born and raised in Canada (he’s from Alberta), but moved with his family to the US when he was a teenager. He’s most known for his regular collaborations with Poul Anderson, as well as his long-running and ambitious Childe cycle. He was one of the pioneers of what we now call military SF.
Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “The Agony of the Leaves” by Evelyn E. Smith

January 31st, 2024

(Cover by Vidmer. Beyond Fantasy Fiction, July 1954.)

Who Goes There?

We don’t know a lot about Evelyn E. Smith (not to be confused with Edward E. Smith), which unfortunately is not unusual for women in pre-New Wave SF, and incidentally she had mostly stepped away from the field by the time the New Wave and second-wave feminism kicked in. Her story is very much like what you’ve come to expect with female SFF authors in the ’50s: she would mostly give up short fiction to focus on novels. Hey, that’s where the money is! It’s a shame, because this is my first story of hers and I’m already looking forward to more stuff of hers. “The Agony of the Leaves” is very much emblematic of the kind of fantasy H. L. Gold wanted printed in the short-lived Beyond Fantasy Fiction, and I mean that in a good way. This is a fun yarn that doesn’t take itself very seriously.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1954 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. It’s been reprinted a total of one time, in Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957). The editor isn’t credited, but seeing as I am friends with a few of the people involved, I can make an educated guess on who the culprit is. Also strange to see “The Agony of the Leaves” included here since it’s urban fantasy and not SF.

Enhancing Image

Ernest is a freelance tea master (I guess they had fictional jobs that don’t exist in the ’50s) who has to live with two women fighting over him—both of whom are witches. Mrs. Greenhut (whatever happened to Mr. Greenhut is never disclosed, although Ernest has his theories) and Ms. Levesque are not the most charming or kind-hearted women, but what they lack of decency they make up for in assertiveness. Ms. Levesque has been giving Ernest love potions while Mrs. Greenhut has been giving him love cookies. “[Ms. Levesque]—both of them—were so careless with other people’s property, as well as with other people themselves.” The two women were once friends but now fight as rivals over Ernest. That Ernest is being fought over by two powerful women and is also able to afford rent with his non-job immediately tells us this is a fantasy, never mind the witch part. Then there’s Nadia, an Eastern European woman whom Ernest has the hots for, and this conflict makes him worry and wonder as to what’s to be done about the witches. So we have what you might call a love square at the heart of it, with Ernest trying to get it with Nadia while also trying to make her understand that two witches are tormenting him.

Getting the obvious out of the way, I’m not sure if Smith would’ve read Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife when she wrote this story. Sure, the magazine version of Conjure Wife would’ve been a decade old at this point, but I have no clue if Smith would’ve read the issue of Unknown it appeared it, and then there’s the fact that Leiber’s novel didn’t see book publication until right before Smith would’ve presumably written her story. A recurring criticism of Leiber’s novel is that it operates on the (admittedly absurd) notion that women are witches; not that witches are women (as they tend to be depicted), but that every other woman in the world is secretly a witch. Achievements that men take for their own are actually the workings of their witch wives, which means (of course Leiber didn’t intend this implication) that women are reponsible for holding up patriarchy. It’s a hurdle to get over, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to have fun at all. Smith’s story seems to be in conversation with Leiber’s; after all, all the women with speaking roles in the story are either witches or suspected to be witches. Unlike the protagonist of Conjure Wife, who makes the uncomfortable discovery that his wife is a witch, Ernest starts out as knowledgable about witchcraft and wants desperately to return to normalcy—whatever that is.

(By the way, the title is a reference to tea-making, “the unfolding of the leaves when boiling water’s poured on them.” Ernest is apparently eager to tell everyone about his tea-making knowledge, and there are even hints that he’s the 1950s equivalent of a weeaboo. Of course it’s also a pun, given how much Ernest suffers here.)

So there are two driving questions: How do we get rid of these witches? And is Nadia a witch herself? When Ernesst and takes Nadia out to dinner, the witches try to ruin the date, and they try pretty hard; but for some reason their magic tricks have no effect on Nadia, who either doessn’t notice or mistakes Ernest’s blubberings for some psychological thing. Nadia herself is a funny character: she talks in butchered English and is weirdly preoccupied with psychoanalysis. Everything that happens to Ernest (according to Nadia) can be explained by either mania or hallucinations. Nadia isn’t even sure these women exist, despite them living in the same apartment building as Ernest. Is Nadia gaslighting Ernest or is she genuinely clueless? It gets to the point where even Mrs. Greenhut and Ms. Levesque are unsure if Nadia is a witch even more powerful than either of them, which leads them ultimately to joining forces—if for no other reason than to get Ernest out of the clutches of this foreign lady. “The Agony of the Leaves” is a novelette that moves at a breakneck pace, such that you probably don’t realize we’re already approaching the climax when Ernest takes Nadia out on that date. Smith has a way with snappy dialogue that makes everything at the very least entertaining.

There Be Spoilers Here

The ending is pretty good. It’s not confirmed if Nadia is a witch or not but it’s implied she’s a normal-ish person, who just so happens to be way more charming than the witches. Ernest ultimately decides that it doesn’t really matter if Nadia is a witch or not, because he’s under a different kind of spell, if we’re to take Nadia as emblematic of the then-modern woman. It’s subversive because we were led to believe that, given her heritage and her unusual behavior, Nadia is a witch of an even older breed than Greenhut and Levesque. There’s an unspoken rule that Eastern European characters are written as prone to a certain pre-Christian mysticism. The two witches admit, however, that they’ve lost this battle. Smith might be saying something about the superficial nature of a lot of relationships, or she could be having fun with it. This is a pretty cynical ending that could take a legitimately dark turn if it wasn’t the ending to a comedy.

A Step farther Out

On the one hand there’s not too much to say about the story itself, but does there need to be? It’s a frivolous satire, of the kind Gold liked, but it does that job with a fun-loving nature that doesn’t read as phoned-in; rather it seems like Smith genuinely liked to play into Gold’s brand of comedy. I never laughed out loud, but I did chuckle a few times and I was smirking for much of it. You could very easily turn this premise into something unfunny and offensive, and in the hands of a male writer from that period (including, sad to say, Leiber) it could’ve been that. A shame this one had to languish in limbo for over half a century; it’s a fun read.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: January 2024

January 1st, 2024
(Cover by Ron Walotsky. F&SF, February 1976.)

Happy New Year, ya screwheads. I said last month I would be taking a year off from covering serials, which means the field has very much opened up for tackling short fiction. The schedule I keep has changed in a sense, except not really; the only difference is that the spots that would normally be held for serial installments are now for short stories. So we’re looking at six or seven short stories a month, which if you ask me is for the best. There are so many short stories across the long history of the biz that I couldn’t stay content with only three or four a month. Think about how much ground there is to cover. Thus we have two novellas and seven short stories for this month, with as many authors being pulled.

There is one other thing I wanna mention, since it will be affecting what I cover for this year. As you know, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is celebrating its 75th anniversary; it had premiered way back in 1949, and was initially called The Magazine of Fantasy. F&SF is such a prestigious outlet, with such a long history and with so much good material gathered in its pages over the decades, that a year-long tribute is in order. The question I then had tumbling around in my head was: How do I go about this? The solution I came to was twofold: first, as with last year, I’ll be covering all short stories in March, July, and October, only this time it will be all fiction from F&SF‘s pages; and the second is that outside of those months I’ll be covering two pieces (a short story and novella, or two of either) from F&SF each month. For example, you may notice we have two novellas from F&SF for January, which I think is a fine idea.

How March, July, and October will work is that I’ll be covering the first thirty years of F&SF across these months, so one decade for each. I’ll be grabbing stories from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively, with the ’70s—falling on October—leaning more towards spooky stuff. F&SF‘s history is so rich that I won’t be able to give an adequate impression of its contents across 75 years, even with the methods I’ve created.

Lastly, in more solemn news, I’ll be reviewing works this month by some notable authors who sadly passed away recently. Michael F. Flynn died in September last year; Michael Bishop died in November; and David Drake died only last month. I’ve tackled Drake before, but while I wasn’t exactly a fan of “Time Safari” I did say I was curious to read more of his work. These are writers who are well-respected in the community and whom sadly I had read very little of when they were alive. If we’re to do right by the dead then we can’t afford to forget them.

For the novellas:
1. “Project Nursemaid” by Judith Merril. From the October 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She became known as an important critic and editor, but she started out as a member of the Futurians. Her story “That Only a Mother” is probably one of the most frequently reprinted classic SF stories, to the point that it’s now a little overexposed. I have to admit that aside from being force-fed “That Only a Mother” across multiple anthologies I’ve not read any of Merril’s other fiction, but I’m about to correct that!
2. “The Samurai and the Willows” by Michael Bishop. From the February 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Placed first in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novella. Speaking of writers I’ve been meaning to read more of, Bishop’s been on my radar for a minute now, but prior to his death I had only read a couple of his short stories. As with some other works of his, Bishop would revise “The Samurai and the Willows” extensively many years after the fact, but we’re reading it as it had originally appeared in F&SF.
For the short stories:
1. “Inertia” by Nancy Kress. From the January 1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction. I’ve covered Kress before, and while it’s always tempting to go for one of her novellas (given her fondness for that mode), I opted for something different—both in length and where the story was published. Kress has been a regular at Asimov’s for years, but “Inertia” is a rare appearance from her in Analog.
2. “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” by Algis Budrys. From the December 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. In some ways diametrically opposed to Judith Merril as a critic, and with as vicious an intellect, Budrys started as one of ’50s SF’s most promising writers. After a decade of heated activity he would turn away from fiction for the most part to focus on criticism and editing.
3. “Apartness” by Vernor Vinge. From the June 1965 issue of New Worlds. Vinge is one of the most important living SF writers, although sadly he retired from writing fiction about a decade ago. Despite being in some ways a prototypical Analog-type writer, Vinge made his debut in the Moorcock-run New Worlds with this story here. He would’ve been all of 19 years old when he wrote “Apartness.”
4. “House of Dreams” by Michael F. Flynn. From the October-November 1997 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner. I actually live one town over from Flynn, but sadly we never got to meet. “House of Dreams” is a rare case of Flynn appearing outside of Analog, and despite the Sturgeon win it has apparently never been reprinted in English, which is weird.
5. “The Valley Was Still” by Manly Wade Wellman. From the August 1939 issue of Weird Tales. Wellman started out during the Gernsback years, and was one of the few SFF authors of that era to maintain his street cred after Campbell took over Astounding—if only because he was more of a fantasy writer. I picked this one for the nerdy reason that it became the basis for a Twilight Zone episode.
6. “The Automatic Rifleman” by David Drake. From the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies. (Yes I’m still counting Destinies and its ilk as magazines.) David Drake was one of the codifying writers of military SF, but his range was a lot wider than that, having also written sword-and-sorcery fantasy and horror, on top of work that’s not so easy to classify. The following story seems to be an exercise in terror.
7. “The Agony of the Leaves” by Evelyn E. Smith. From the July 1954 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. I only discovered this one as part of a very recent SF anthology edited by a certain colleague, and I’m pretty sure it’s not SF. As with too many female SFF writers in the ’50s, Smith moved away from the short fiction market once new avenues opened up; after 1960 she mostly stuck to novels.
And that’s it.

Won’t you read with me?

Tag: evelyn e. smith

Short Story Review: “The Princess and the Physicist” by Evelyn E. Smith

Things Beyond: March 2025

Short Story Review: “The Agony of the Leaves” by Evelyn E. Smith

Things Beyond: January 2024