Tag: fantasy and science fiction

Short Story Review: “Angels in Love” by Kathe Koja

September 6th, 2024

(Cover by Malgorzata Rapnicka. F&SF, July 1991.)

Who Goes There?

There seemed to be a point in the ’90s when Kathe Koja could lay claim to being the best horror writer in the business, and certainly her output at this time was hard to argue with. She debuted in the late ’80s, as part of a wave of extreme and body-focused horror writers (think Clive Barker), although she also has quite a snarky sense of humor that tends to stop her fiction from becoming a black hole. In the 21st century her output has generally slowed down and she’s turned more to YA, which might partly explain why she has not been given the amount of attention she deserves. In a better world Koja would be awaking millions of readers to her unique style and explorations of the human body’s relationship to the external world, but instead we’ll have to awaken ourselves to her. Unfortunately most of her novels are not exactly easy to find in the wild. “Angels in Love” is a short but finely tuned story, packed with tension and perversion, more of a character study than a conventional horror narrative. This was published the same year as Koja’s first novel, The Cipher, and if you were on the look-out in 1991 it would’ve been hard to deny the talent on display.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s since been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifth Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Koja collection Extremities. That Dozois reprint is funny considering it’s arguably not SF.

Enhancing Image

The next-door neighbors are being loud, which is not normally something Lurleen would mind—except that the neighbors are fucking. Not the usual kind of fucking, but something more vigorous and yet mysterious. A rhythmic thumping that isn’t bed springs, and she’s not hearing the people’s moans exactly. “Lying there listening, her own bones tingled, skin rippled light with goose bumps, speculation: who made those strange, strange sounds?” It has to be sex. What else could it be? Of course Lurleen is interested, at least in part because she’s bored with her day-to-day life, working at a record store for a boss (Roger) she doesn’t like. Bored and lonely. This was also in the days before high-speed internet, so if you wanted to jerk it as a way of passing the time or to relieve pressure you had to resort to print, film, or your imagination. In this sense “Angels in Love” shows its age, in that it presumably had to take place in a pre-internet world, in the world of the erotic thriller—Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Brian De Palma movies, and so on. The erotic thriller (and “Angels in Love” could be understood partly as an example of such a thing) is a subgenre that basically doesn’t exist anymore, due to a few factors: the availability of online porn, but also moviegoers seem to be more squeamish now than thirty years ago. This is a graphic and indeed borderline pornographic story, but the eroticism is very much there for a purpose, not to mention it helps build tension. There’s a reason the erotic thriller was popular for a while, which is the overlap between feeling horny and feeling scared—the heightened blood pressure and senses being needed for both.

I guess people spying on their neighbors the old-fashioned way, by eavesdropping or using a pair of binoculars, was more acceptable back then. Not to say what Lurleen’s doing is good, but she’s framed such that it’s easy to sympathize with her despite her perversion. After all, she’s clearly lonely and sexually deprived, her boss is a pain in the ass, the men she meets outside of work tend to be pigs. She wants to be desired but not objectified, which almost sounds like a paradox, because how do you present yourself in an interaction as desirable without also becoming a slab of meat to the other party? She knows Roger objectifies her, she knows the clerk at the store objectifies her, she knows the dumb muscle she picks up at bars sees her the same way. But here the tables have turned, as she objectifies her neighbors without even seeing them first—although she soon works to change that. “It came to her that she had never really seen that next-door neighbor of hers.” The girl next door is Anne, and Lurleen is surprised to find that the woman who’s been having such amazing sex (or so Lurleen thinks) is so… boring. Not obnoxious or messy, but bland. Beige. When they finally meet Lurleen is put off by how normal Anne is—so unassuming, actually, that she becomes an uncanny figure. The mystery then becomes with regards to the man Anne is seeing, assuming it’s the same man (and assuming it’s a man, which Lurleen does) every time Lurleen spies on them. So Anne is boring, but then what about the man she’s seeing?

The subtle horror of “Angels in Love” works in two ways: the mystery of the next-door neighbor, but also the lengths Lurleen goes to in finding out her neighbor’s private life. She starts acting in ways that are undeniably creepy, and were she not the perspective character it would be easy to understand Lurleen as a villain. This is not a case of unintended dissonance between the protagonist’s actions and what the reader expects of them, but part of the story’s design. Lurleen is an anti-heroine, and in just a handful of pages Koja makes sure we know this. There’s an especially creepy passage where she takes her eavesdropping to levels that would be considered unacceptable, even by most perverts:

She began to stalk Anne, never thinking of it in so many words, but as sure and surely cautious as any predator. Waiting, lingering in the hallway after work, for Anne to come home from whatever unfathomable job she did all day. Never stopping to talk, just a smile, pleasant make-believe. She made it her business to do her laundry when Anne did hers; at the first whoosh and stagger of the old machine, Lurleen was there, quarters in hand; her clothes had never been so clean; she had to see. Any jockey shorts, bikini underwear, jockstraps, what? She meant to take one if she could, steal it before, before it was clean. Smell it. You can tell a lot about a man.

This is a cosmic horror story ultimately, and we’ll get to that part, but Koja understands that often the scariest thing is human behavior—something that can be found in everyday life, no science fiction or fantasy needed. Lurleen’s growing obsession with Anne and her mystery boyfriend escalates at a rate that makes enough sense and at the same time doesn’t feel rushed, given how short this story is. It has to do with stalking, and getting too interested in other people’s lives, but it also has to do with misogyny, both how the male characters view the women and Lurleen’s own internalized misogyny against Anne, whose only crime is being a “sorry-looking bitch.” She wonders how such an “empty” person could have such a stud muffin in her bed on a regular basis, as opposed to Lurleen’s bed. Because she obviously deserves him more, right? And yet she also wonders, given Anne’s own blandness, “Could a man want a woman to be nothing? Just a space to fill? Lurleen had known plenty of guys who liked their women dumb—it made them feel better—but anyway, Anne didn’t seem dumb, just empty.” Is wanting a woman to be “just a space to fill” at the core of misogyny? Is that what it comes down to? Maybe it’s as simple as that. Maybe Anne is with this mystery man because she’s such easy pray. Lurleen’s about to find out.

There Be Spoilers Here

Cosmic horror is ultimately about the terror of discovering something you shouldn’t have—of fucking around and finding out. Lurleen fucks around and she finds out. In a way the conclusion is totally predictable; if anything it’s a release after the building tension and the escalating of Lurleen’s creepy behavior. We know that at some point this story has to enter SFF territory at some point, and so it does on the final page. During one of their bouts Anne and her boyfriend suddenly stop, seemingly mid-thrust, which concerns Lurleen enough that she rushes over next door to see what’s going on. What she encounters is hard to describe, and there’s a certain degree of ambiguity in the situation. “His body beautiful, and huge, not like a man’s, but so real it seemed to suck up all the space in the room, big elementary muscles, and he was using them all.” Anne’s back is bent at an unnatural angle and some liquid “like spoiled black jelly” is leaking from her mouth. Is she dead? Is fucking what the two had actually been doing this whole time? How long has this been going on? We never learn, and neither will Lurleen, maybe. The creature takes notice of her, and the story ends before we find out what becomes of either of them. We do know that Lurleen has just stepped over a line she shouldn’t crossed, and that she has gained the notice of something whose attention you don’t really want. I do have to wonder if maybe Koja had taken inspiration from Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, or Hellraiser, in making the “angel” of the story a supreme sadist—a supernatural creature whose definition of pleasure includes immense pain. Maybe it was an angel, long ago, but it had gone bad.

A Step Farther Out

I’m not sure what else to say, go read this one.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “There Used to Be Olive Trees” by Rich Larson

August 27th, 2024

(Cover by Charles Vess. F&SF, Jan-Feb 2017.)

Who Goes There?

Rich Larson is probably the youngest author I’ve covered on this site; he’s only a few years older than me, but he’s been mighty busy for the past decade and change, mostly in the realm of short fiction. His debut back in the early 2010s coincided with the proliferation of online magazines, in a boom for the market not seen since the ’50s. (Ironically today’s story appeared in one of the old guard.) While he has not yet garnered a Hugo or Nebula nomination it’s only a matter of time before his work is given major awards recognition, as he has made first in the Asimov’s readers’ poll multiple times and has been featured in multiple best-of-the-year anthologies. His 2015 story “Ice” was adapted into a Love, Death + Robots episode, and his most recent novel, Ymir, came out in 2022. By Larson’s own admission much of his fiction can be considered a continuation of cyberpunk, with some transhumanist elements. “There Used to Be Olive Trees” is a coming-of-age narrative set in the far future, on an Earth that seems to be recovering from a worldwide catastrophe; and while it isn’t cyberpunk exactly it does have one or two elements of that subgenre.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January-February 2017 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is not available online. If you want a copy you’ll have to hunt for a used copy or take your chances with F&SF‘s website. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois) and Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (ed. Steve Berman).

Enhancing Image

Valentin is 16 years old and is one of the lucky few in “the Town” to have been fitted with an implant, or “godchip,” on his forehead, which should allow him to make contact with the Town’s “machine god.” The problem is that for those with implants there’s a test, or “prueba,” a kind of rite of passage one’s expected to pass with the first or second try; for Valentin he’s on his fourth attempt, which is unheard of. For reasons totally beyond him he’s been unable to talk with the Town’s god, and so he’s been sent out into the wilderness again, with just some provisions and most usefully his “nanoshadow,” a skin suit that will help him with the harsh climate. This sounds like a lot of setup for a story that will ultimately involve only two characters, more or less, plus a character (Javier, Valentin’s overseer) who is mentioned but remains offscreen, and it does seem a bit frontloaded! This is a solid novelette and it feels both simple and a little overly complicated, since once we meet the second main character the narrative turns into a Jack London-esque surviving-in-the-wilderness tale with technology playing a peripheral role. Soon after leaving the Town, Valentin meets a “wilder,” one of those people who lives outside what remains of civilization, a fellow teen boy named Pepe. The two don’t get along at first, which is understandable since Valentin’s implant and equipment make him a juicy target for wilders more vicious than Pepe.

Minding that Larson would’ve only been 23 or 24 when he wrote this, it’s a fine job that has enough meat on its bones to imply a larger world. I said Larson is a cyberpunk fan, and there are a few cues taken from that subgenre here, despite it falling much more into post-apocalyptic SF. The nanoshadow, which Valentin is unable to use for most of the story, would very much fit in with a cyberpunk narrative—the big difference being that the dystopian cityscape that would normally be host to cyberpunk is mostly no more. The Spain of the story has long since been ruined, and even in the wilderness there isn’t a lot that could sustain human life. Understandably, for someone who has spent his whole life in what amounts to a bubble, Valentin takes a fascination to Pepe, and this fascination might well be reciprocated. I’m not counting it as a spoiler, because something doesn’t sit right with me when it comes to treating characters’ sexualities as plot revelations, so I’ll say here that the reluctant friendship formed between Valentin and Pepe burns slowly into something romantic—or maybe just sexual. It’s hard to say. Our insights into Valentin’s mind tell us he finds Pepe very much attractive, but it’s never elaborated on if this has to do with Pepe’s looks or if it’s merely the fact that he’s interacting with someone around his own age who doesn’t see him as just a “prophet” in training. The queerness is shown but not discussed at all, and I’m not sure how to feel about this. Maybe taboos regarding homosexuality have become a non-issue now that the world has basically ended. Values change with time and circumstances. It’s not a bad depiction of queerness, but I wish there was more to it.

The plot borders on nonexistent, but we do have goals for both of the main characters which happen to intertwine. Valentin has to go to what is called the autofab, to speak with the god of the Town, and Pepe also wants to go to the autofab—only not for the same reason. At some point in the past humanity invented truly sentient AI, and these AI personalities may have become too powerful, to the point where they can interfere with the material world with a mere thought—or, in the case of Valentin and other prophets, with a bit of coaxing. Knowledge of how these AIs came about seems relegated to the Town and other strongholds of civilization, although interestingly I don’t recall us getting an explanation of how Earth came to be ruined and if the AIs had something to do with it. This story was written a few years before “AI” (machine learning) became a hot-button issue, so I have to wonder if Larson would’ve gone about the AI things if he had written this more recently. It makes sense that a humanity that’s mostly been thrown back to barbarism would see AIs as gods, but as with the relationship between Valentin and Pepe this idea feels underdeveloped. I’ve read that when it comes to first drafts Larson likes to write the whole thing in one long sitting, which admittedly is how I tend to go about my own writing (he who casts the first stone yadda yadda), but “There Used to Be Olive Trees” reads like it could’ve been polished more.

There Be Spoilers Here

When we do finally meet the “god” in the autofab, it comes off as sort of an anti-climax. The world opens up at the end a bit, but aside from Valentin’s own personal uncertainty as a prophet the story doesn’t end so much as it comes to a sudden halt. His relationship with Pepe goes unresolved, and the phrasing at the very end implies the possibility of a sequel, although as far as I can tell Larson never wrote one.

A Step Farther Out

“There Used to Be Olive Trees” is a robust and somewhat queer story that doesn’t have any glaring problems, but conversely it’s the kind of story I would consider unexceptional. It doesn’t help that while the title implies climate catastrophe and it’s something that clearly lingers in the background of the narrative, climate change is not really a topic that comes up for the characters, nor does the desolation of the setting seem to have much weight on their minds. Similarly the relationship between Valentin and Pepe is allowed to develop, but only up to a point, and I do have to wonder if the story’s queerness, or rather it’s playing with gender, could’ve been much expanded on, for the characters’ sakes but also to tie their budding relationship more into the plot. It’s a functional story that ultimately falls short an inch or two of its potential.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Retrograde Summer” by John Varley

August 6th, 2024

(Cover by David Hardy. F&SF, February 1975.)

Who Goes There?

When it comes to SF in the ’70s, you kinda have to talk about John Varley unless you’re one of those people who only reads novels. Varley made his debut in the August 1974 issues of F&SF and Vertex simultaneously, so this actually marks the 50th anniversary of his debut. (Those issues would’ve been on newsstands in July, but let me have this one.) So Varley pretty quickly made a name for himself as one of the most exciting new writers in the field, and for those first few years it was just with short stories. More specifically his stories about what he would call the Eight Worlds did and honestly still do read as fresh, if also products of their time to an extent. Varley would win three Hugos and two Nebulas, but none of these were for his Eight Worlds stories and indeed none of those stories won any awards, to my recollection. Not sure why. Even The Ophiuchi Hotline, Varley’s debut novel (he had apparently written one before but couldn’t get it published because it sucked), which is a pretty gnarly read and which serves as a sort of climax to those original Eight Worlds stories, only got a Locus poll spot. “Retrograde Summer” was Varley’s third published story and the second to take place in the Eight Worlds continuity; it also nabbed him his first Nebula nomination. Compared to some later entries in this series it’s on the tame side, but you can imagine reading “Retrograde Summer” in 1975 and finding it a mind-bending experience.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #5 (ed. Terry Carr), Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (ed. Gardner Dozois), and the Varley collections The Persistence of Vision and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories. Not to flex or anything, but that latter Varley collection was a limited edition, all copies signed, and I happen to have one. Was not exactly cheap. What’s neat about The John Varley Reader and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories is that there’s zero overlap between them. “Retrograde Summer” is also one of the few stories published in F&SF to appear there twice, as it was reprinted in the June-July 2009 issue.

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Perhaps it’s fitting that the first Varley story I cover here is set on the first planet in our solar system: Mercury.

Timothy is a 17-year-old aspiring pilot on Mercury, living with his mom Dorothy, has a special visitor coming in from Earth’s moon: Jubilant, his sister, whom he has never met before. Jubilant is older “by three E-years,” making her the big sister, and the two don’t exactly get along at first sight. This is all a bit of an odd experience since Timothy isn’t sure how Jubilant is his sister, and as we learn about family arrangements for this future humanity it’s hard to blame his confusion. The awkwardness isn’t helped by Jubilant’s total unfamiliarity with life on Mercury, and like other “loonies” she has to adjust to the gravitational pull of even this small planet. (“I’d hate to be a loonie; just about anywhere they go, they’re too heavy.) Mercury has not been terraformed; instead humans have adapted themselves to the planet’s incredibly harsh climate, shielding themselves from the sun through various means while also having skin-tight suits (or null-suits as they’re called in the Eight Worlds) that are basically full-body condoms. Something clever and revolutionary Varley did at the time was that he posited humans would be able to conquer the solar system, not through terraforming that would take literal centuries but by changing themselves in order to live in environments not suited for organic life, via technology, genetic tampering, or a combo of those things. It’s not totally plausible, but it’s a twist on space colonization that I’ve seen surprisingly few authors go for post-Varley, and honestly it reads as borderline transhumanist.

Some more context, because the thing with the Eight Worlds stories is that there isn’t a single one which gives us all the details as to how this future humanity works, which might be why none of these stories won awards despite being very fun and interesting. They’re greater than the sum of their parts is what I’m saying. For instance, we’re not told in this story why people aren’t living on Earth anymore; it’s because mankind basically got kicked off Earth by an alien race so much more powerful that it wasn’t even a contest. The bad news is that millions of people died in the ensuing exile, but the good news is that mankind got to inherit the rest of the solar system, including Earth’s moon. Call it a mixed bag. This is a future where cloning is not uncommon, where people can achieve nigh-immortality via memory uploading, where you can get three arms or a fully functioning tail, and where changing one’s sex is seen as perhaps a minor surgical procedure. Timothy himself lived most of his life so far as a woman, only “Changing” a couple years ago, and Dorothy points out that Jubilant looks very much like how Timothy did when he was a she. Right, so I should probably also mention that Varley’s idea of sex and gender, while very permissive for the ’70s, also now seems a bit… backwards. Not “backwards” as in morally dubious (although there is a bit of that), but more that Varley seemed to think of the relationship between sex and gender as reversed from how it actually works. Characters in the Eight Worlds change their gender when they change their sex, as opposed to aligning their sexual characteristics to fit more with their gender, which after all is self-perception. Let’s say there’s a lot to unpack here from a genderqueer perspective.

As for actual quibbles I have with the story, I have a couple, although nothing major. For one I find Varley’s fondness for first-person narration to not always work, depending on the story’s tone and the likability of the narrator. Timothy is a perfectly fine character who works as someone who stands on the shadow-line between childhood and adulthood, but there is a small problem in him being the narrator since we already know in advance that he’ll come out of this problem fine; because “Retrograde Summer” is at least ostensibly an adventure narrative, a tale of survival in which siblings take the situation as their cue to bond. It doesn’t help either that it’s quite hard for people in the Eight Worlds to die permanently, thanks to the aforementioned cloning and memory banks. Thus other means of generating tension are required, and in the case of this story there’s already enough tension between the family members, since Timothy gets the strong impression that Dorothy is keeping secrets from him as to his exact relationship with his sister. It’s hard to blame him, considering Timothy and Jubilant turn out to be a bit more related than the former had previously thought. Before I get to that, I do wanna mention that I like how Varley is able to info-dump on us as to how society on Mercury works whilst making it quite entertaining. Timothy and his mom live on a hilltop, which has a symbolic function but which also serves a practical function given the planet’s tendency for earthquakes. “If you live at the top of a rise, you have a better chance of being near the top of the rubble when it slides down. Besides, my mother and I both liked the view.” It’s like living in California.

Basically this is a story about entering adulthood, which is perhaps predictable, but it’s vividly drawn, helped maybe by the fact that Varley was a burned-out former hippie (or fellow traveler to hippies) who would’ve only been 26 when he wrote this. Timothy is a bit precocious, but he’s convincing as a teen character I think because Varley is writing about a time in one’s life that wouldn’t have been too far away in the rearview mirror for him. There’s an energy and sheer youthfulness to Varley’s early fiction that he wasn’t able to recapture as he got older, but here it’s in a pretty raw state. This is a bit of a double-edged sword, though, since while Varley had a knack for writing child and teen characters, there were also—let’s say problematic things in those early stories that would rub one’s modern sensibilities the wrong way. Starting in the New Wave years more or less there began this troubling tendency in genre SF where relations between grown-ass adults and minors were written about in a way that would (or at least should) give the average person goosebumps, and Varley had to be one of the worst offenders of this back in the ’70s—a discomforting notion that blemished some of what would otherwise be his strongest fiction. “Retrograde Summer” doesn’t have such nonsense, thankfully, although this is still a future society where legally emancipated minors are not too uncommon. Jubilant herself had “divorced her mother when she was ten E-years old,” which as Timothy notes is still a peculiarity, although Jubilant had emancipated herself from her mother on the moon on the basis of “religious insanity.”

If this sounds like a lot, we’re only just getting started.

There Be Spoilers Here

So what counts as religious insanity in the context of the Eight Worlds? As Jubilant tells us, after she and Timothy inevitably get trapped in an earthquake, Dorothy used to be “genotypically” a man… and also their dad. The thing about families in Eight Worlds societies is that they don’t exist anymore, or at least the nuclear family model is considered taboo. It’s one child per parent, and the idea is that each parent would raise their child more or less by themself. You might have a mother, but you wouldn’t have a “father.” That Dorothy used to be a man but also used to be the “father” in a couple that practiced the fringe religious belief of raising children together as a couple (gasp) comes as a shock to Timothy. Oh, and there’s another thing: Timothy is a clone. Jubilant was born first, and in fact Timothy was a clone grown from Jubilant while the latter was still a toddler; so the reason the two look so similar when both are women is that they’re genetically the same person. After finding this out Timothy says it’s a shame the two can’t have sex together while trapped under the rubble, and I can’t tell if this is meant to be a joke on either of their parts. After finding out they’re not siblings (at least not in the traditional sense) there’s some romantic/sexual tension, but it goes unresolved. Does fucking your clone count as incest? Mind you that Varley would write clones boinking each other in some later Eight Worlds stories with the appropriate amount of gusto. Incest enjoyers will get a bit of a kick out of the sexual tension here. Anyway, Timothy and Jubilant are old enough and close enough in age that it wouldn’t really be a problem, at least compared to some of the more questionable relationships in Varley’s fiction (Heinlein has a lot to answer for).

I will say I was surprised to find this classified as a novelette, as I’m sure it barely counts; it’s actually shorter than I was expecting. Our Heroes™ spend the back end of the story doing very little, out of necessity given they’re trying to conserve oxygen; but basically once Timothy starts coming to terms with his status as Jubilant’s clone they’re rescued, just like that. It’s bad storytelling when the conflict is resolved passively, such as here, but it’s the kind of mistake that’s easy to forgive or gloss over given how engrossing Varley’s writing is, even when he’s doing exposition. It’s just that the ending comes too quickly and easily, and there are a couple loose ends, such as how their relationship might develop after this point. Are they into each other or not? It’s unclear. It’s also unclear how this bomb of a revelation will change Timothy’s perception of his mother, but I get we don’t necessarily need to know that. This is a coming-of-age narrative, more about Timothy crossing the shadow-line from childhood to young adulthood than even the real danger of the earthquake. If you read enough of these Eight Worlds stories you realize that main characters are rarely in tangible danger, so instead Varley works to build character and the world around the characters. Unlike (if I’m being brutally honest) a lot of modern short SF, however, which too often strikes me as just moody and no-fun-allowed, Varley’s early writing was fun. I was disappointed by the suddenness of this story’s ending because I wanted more of it, which as I’ve said elsewhere is usually the best complaint one can have about a work of art.

A Step Farther Out

It’s good, even if it ends abruptly. I’ve also read enough of Varley’s short fiction at this point, pretty much all of which came after “Retrograde Summer,” that this didn’t exactly hold any surprises for me. That’s not even a question of the story showing its age, because if this is your first Varley story and you’re reading it in [THE CURRENT YEAR] then you might still find it a little spicy. If anything it’s an indicator of, let’s say more eccentric stories in the Eight Worlds series, that were to come later.

See you next time.
Short Story: “The Movie People” by Robert Bloch

July 31st, 2024

(Cover by Ron Walotsky. F&SF, October 1969.)

Who Goes There?

We’ve reached the end of the month, as well as the end of my marathon covering F&SF as it was in the ’60s, which as it turns out was a pretty weird time for the magazine! In that ten-year period F&SF went through four editors, and you can tell different hands were at the wheel at different points, because for better or worse this was a transitory period. Robert Bloch himself comes off as a rather transitory writer, in that he always seemed to be going for some new angle, never staying in the same place for long. Bloch has one of the more unusual career trajectories of any genre writer, and you can also partly blame him for our modern obsession with true crime. In the ’30s Bloch became (if I remember right) the youngest member of the Lovecraft circle, even corresponding with Lovecraft himself, despite Bloch being a snotty teenager at the time. While he would drift away from Lovecraftian horror, Bloch remained mostly a horror writer, although interestingly today’s story is not horror at all. Of course you know him for Psycho, and he was also a prolific screenwriter for film and TV, namely a few classic Star Trek episodes. I’ve read enough of Bloch at this point to know he loved the movies, to the point where he might’ve been as inspired by horror in cinema as horror in literature; but again, “The Movie People” is quite different. Bloch was born in Chicago but would eventually settle in Los Angeles, and today’s story is a bittersweet ode to his adopted city.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in New Worlds of Fantasy #2 (ed. Terry Carr), Hollywood Unreel: Fantasies About Hollywood and the Movies (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh), Silver Scream (ed. David J. Schow), plus the Bloch collections The Best of Robert Bloch and The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume 3.

Enhancing Image

This story could be considered, to some extent, autobiographical. It’s circa 1970 and the narrator may as well be a stand-in for Bloch, living in LA and friends with a guy, Jimmy Rogers, who’s about a generation older than him. Jimmy is an old man now, but back in the 1920s he had started making cash as a regular extra in silent movie productions, along with his girlfriend at the time, June Logan. The narrator, in no small part to console his friend in his old age, goes with Jimmy to The Silent Movie, “the only place in town where you can still go and see The Mark of Zorro. There’s always a Chaplin comedy, and usually Laurel and Hardy, along with a serial starring Pearl White, Elmo Lincoln, or Houdini.” It’s what it says on the tin, playing silent movies at a time when silent movies would’ve been relegated to TV airings, on the occasion they were played at all. While he would’ve still been a kid when silent movies got usurped by sound productions, Bloch apparently held them in high regard, with the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera specifically being a gateway drug for his getting into horror. We’re clearly supposed to sympathize with Jimmy, since his original job had been taken over and his industry changed forever—never mind the fact that June has been dead for four decades now.

One of the first things I thought while reading “The Movie People” was that in 1969 this nostalgic treatment of Hollywood in the years before the invention of synchronized sound would not have been as old hat then as now, although there was still precedent for it at the time. (I’m ashamed to say I still have not seen Singin’ in the Rain.) Your knowledge of film history may or may not improve the experience, since Bloch assumes you have at least a cursory knowledge of Hollywood during the silent era, but then if you’re familiar with the historical material you can already predict the arc of the narrative and the sentimentality behind it. We learn about Jimmy and June’s relationship, which was kind of a Star Is Born scenario in which Jimmy couldn’t rise above being an extra and June was clearly on her way up the ladder—and no doubt would’ve continued her way up, had she not died in a freak accident. It was 1930 and June was on the set for an early sound production. The crew was experimenting with a traveling boom mic, what has long since become the standard for film productions, only it was newfangled then. “Somehow, during a take, it broke loose and the boom crashed, crushing June Logan’s skull.” It’s a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for the changing of the guard sound film brought about, ruining careers and hitting immigrants in the industry the hardest. Read some film history and filmmakers and historians will always treat The Jazz Singer as if it were one of the horsemen of the apocalypse (it’s also kind of a shitty movie). The late ’20s in Hollywood (other film industries lagged behind in adopting sound) marked the end of an era.

Bloch is a lot of things, but he’s not subtle. The man himself seemed aware of this, as he all but says in his lecture “Imagination and Modern Science Fiction,” for my money one of Bloch’s very best pieces of writing. It’s savage, insightful, and very funny, although while he did write some SF, Bloch was never much of an SF writer. “The Movie People” is not really horror either, being that rare example of a ghost story which does not try to evoke dread or terror, but instead melancholy. The thing is that The Silent Movie seems to be haunted—maybe. It’s unclear where the supernatural is coming from, but the short of it is that Jimmy has started to notice June has been appearing on the margins of old silent movies, including ones she would not have taken part in; for example he sees her in The Birth of a Nation, which came out nearly a decade before June’s first film role. (I could go on a whole tirade about how The Birth of a Nation went from being a deeply controversial but massively successful movie at the time of its release, to sort of just being accepted as part of the American film canon, to now being treated like that one aunt or uncle who thinks Trump actually won the 2020 election. But I won’t.) Despite not having seen her alive in forty years Jimmy can still pick her out from a crowd, and is convinced there must be some ghostly hijinks going on with these films such that he can see dead people in the roles of extras. Of course the narrator doesn’t believe this, but he wants to be there for his friend—perhaps even more so now, since he’s convinced Jimmy is seeing things in his old age.

There Be Spoilers Here

On the set of his latest “role,” Jimmy gets a mysterious letter which then falls into the narrator’s hands, and it’s a surprisingly long letter especially when you consider it was somehow written by a dead person. *It could be a hoax of course, but this is a ghost story and we have to take everything at face value, never mind that Jimmy’s suspicions about the ghosts in the silent movies are proven true at the very end.) It’s a letter from June, telling her long-lost boyfriend that he can join her and others as an extra from beyond the grave. There are rules to be followed and some advice given (humorously she tells him to stay away from “the slapstick comedies”), but Jimmy is given the chance to be with June again. Naturally he takes it. The ending is bittersweet, because on the one hand Jimmy dies on-set, but it’s not tragic or brutal death at all; indeed he looks “very much as though he were smiling in his sleep” when they find him. One thing that confuses me, and this is something I’ve started to notice more when giving fiction the deep-read treatment, is that the narrator acts like Jimmy was being delusional as he is recounting his story, despite already knowing that Jimmy’s speculation about The Silent Movie being haunted has merit. Why would a narrator act like they don’t know certain information when they already know that info? It’s a common fallacy with writing first-person narrators. Anyway, that final scene where the narrator goes to The Silent Movie and sees Jimmy and June waving at him in one of Intolerance‘s famous crowd scenes is sweet. (I’ve yet to see Intolerance either, it’s a glaring blind spot for me.)

A Step Farther Out

I’m quite biased about the history behind this story, being an actual film major who’s seen a decent amount of 1920s cinema at this point, but I came away from “The Movie People” with mixed feelings. The thing is that Bloch is an ironist at heart; he’s kind of a bastard. His fiction usually falls on a spectrum between horror and comedy, with his most effective work being either darkly humorous or horrific with a touch of playful irony. “The Movie People” basically falls outside of this spectrum altogether as it’s a story more or less without irony; it’s totally sincere. I’m not sure if this is Bloch’s wheelhouse. It’s a cute diversion that tries to tug at the reader’s heartstrings a bit, but I would’ve preferred this material be put in the hands of a writer more delicate than Bloch. But that’s just me.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “They Are Not Robbed” by Richard McKenna

July 27th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, January 1968.)

Who Goes There?

Richard McKenna was kind of an outsider, although this would only become apparent with hindsight. He had a long career in the navy before deciding to take up writing as his new profession, debuting in 1958 with the nominally fantastical (it’s not SF) “Casey Agonistes,” which drew on his military experience, but more importantly introduced a whimsical and rather offbeat voice to the field. Unfortunately he would only live to see six of his short stories published in his lifetime, dying unexpectedly in November 1964 at only 51 years old. He seemed to dedicate most of his writing energy to what would be his first and only novel, The Sand Pebbles, a historical novel which hinted at McKenna’s success as a mainstream writer; and indeed he lived to see it become a bestseller, although he sadly did not live long enough to see it get turned into a major motion picture starring Steve McQueen. Even had McKenna lived longer, writing SF was probably always gonna stay a side hustle for him at the most; and yet it’s hard to not think of what more he could’ve done had he been given more time. “They Are Not Robbed” is one of a half-dozen or so stories found in McKenna’s trunk after his death, and I have to assume he had finished it despite being it a bit overlong and overstuffed. It’s not perfect, but it has some standout qualities that indicate a possibly great talent gone too soon.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1968 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has only been reprinted in English once, in Uncollected Stars (ed. Piers Anthony, Martin H. Greenberg, Barry N. Malzberg, and Charles G. Waugh).

Enhancing Image

It’s circa 1980 and Earth has been invaded—sort of. The aliens are called Star Birds, for lack of a better name, since they don’t communicate verbally and they can be barely even perceived with the human eye. Rather than try to talk with humans directly the Star Birds have opted to hire “Agents,” who tend to be young women without friends or parents, these Agents being trained to understand the aliens. The thing is that these Agents, along with a small number of other people, have what is called Tau energy, which makes them kin to the aliens. Of course the problem is that people with this energy, the “Tau people,” are quickly treated as outcasts by the rest of the populace—not entirely for bad reasons, as Tau energy has reality-warping properties that could make it a real danger in the wrong hands. There’s no cultural exchange between the humans and aliens, although the aliens have left a kind of “gift” in several locations around the world, called “Purchasing Offices” which “bought raw neural energy or else recorded dynamic patterns of neural energy.” What the aliens gain by basically having people’s brains scanned is a mystery. A very old Aldous Huxley is the one famous person cited who volunteered one of these Purchasing Offices, and he did get paid for it, although the aliens seem to pay people who go to the Purchasing Offices different amounts arbitrarily.

I feel like I’m frontloading exposition here, but so does McKenna. It’s only fair. By the way, McKenna must’ve written this story prior to November 1963, as Huxley would die that month—incidentally on the same day as John F. Kennedy and C. S. Lewis. The implication is that McKenna had the story finished well before his death but was unable to sell it, I suspect for a few reasons. One is that “They Are Not Robbed” would’ve been a bit risqué for early ’60s SF, what with unambiguous references to sex and a touch of nudity, although by 1968 such softcore material was no longer so unusual in most markets. I also have to admit this is a very odd story, in a way that seemed to anticipate the New Wave, such that I have to wonder how McKenna would’ve done had he lived even five more years. The protagonist is also a fair bit different from what would’ve been the norm in the early ’60s, with Christopher Lane being a workingman and a bit of a slacker, who as of late has found himself in a weird quasi-polyamorous relationship with a vapid girl named Alma, who also seems to be in a relationship with a guy named Buckley. “Both Alma and Buckley worked in Sales at Acme. Once she had been Buckley’s girl, now she was somehow Lane’s, at least on Thursdays.” They’re not in a serious relationship, and while Alma’s not a bad person or anything she’s more there to kill time. Worth mentioning that despite taking place in the ’80s this story very much feels entrenched in Greenwich Village culture of the early ’60s, such that it must’ve almost felt like a time capsule even when it was published.

Even the coming of the Star Birds doesn’t shake up Lane’s life—at least not directly. But he gets to know one of their Agents, Martha, in a relationship that will come to dominate the story. This is a bit perplexing since Martha herself isn’t much of a character, which is at least partly by design given her position as an Agent. There’s clearly supposed to be a contrast between Alma’s hollow materialism and Martha’s mysticism, although I have to say neither woman is given that much development. Lane himself is not the most charismatic of leads either, so it’s a good thing the story isn’t really about him—it’s about the bigger picture. We’re given some insight into how Tau people are treated after the aliens have landed, which is to say very badly; it’s actually disturbing how quickly the general populace almost become a bunch of bloodthirsty mobs, with the lynch noose becoming a common symbol among anti-Tau people, like the cross for Christians. (Another telltale sign this was written in the early ’60s is that while not explicitly mentioned, McKenna seemed to have written this with the civil rights movement lurking in the background, never exactly rearing its head but I’m pretty sure informing the text.) Society is slowly becoming divided, or rather humanity is slowly being split in two, between the Tau minority and non-Tau majority, and Lane associating with the former could present some real dangers. Not overnight, but gradually Lane’s world is being turned upside down for the sake of a mysterious woman he has fallen head over heels for, and things only get weirder when the Tau energy reveals that the world we see is not strictly the only one that exists, for there is another.

I’ve been struggling to write about “They Are Not Robbed” for the past couple days, and I think the big reason for that is that I don’t entirely understand this story; it’s rather hard to describe. It’s a first contact narrative, but it then turns into something else, and the closest point of comparison I can think of off the top of my head would be McKenna’s own “The Secret Place,” which is also a bizarre love story I’ve never been entirely able to wrap my head around. Despite his short work being at least nominally SF McKenna strikes me as more of a fantasist, in that he doesn’t seem terribly interested in the why of the SFnal elements of his fiction. The Tau energy at the heart of “They Are Not Robbed” is hard to explain because McKenna doesn’t go to great lengths at all to explain how it works. The result is a story that’s surreal, and effective insofar as it’s trying to evoke a sense of mystery and mysticism, but it’s also confusing. It reads as more or less finished, but could’ve benefited from one more round of revision, namely to tighten up the length (it must be a solid 12,000 words and could’ve been shorter) and make the narrative more focused. The budding romance between Lane and Martha is fine, but it takes an odd turn when we’re introduced to two new ideas, neither of which is much elaborated on: the existence of “time-lands” for Tau people, which exist in a separate but parallel space with Earth of the present moment; and then there are the “doublegangers,” or the doubles of the Tau people who must never cross paths with their originals or else something bad would happen.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s good news that as a new Tau person Lane has been introduced to the time-lands, because the Purchasing Offices have gradually been vanishing around the world; apparently the Star Birds are removing these stations and will soon be on their way. There will come a point, soon, when there will be no way to traverse between the worlds, at least from Earth’s side. This is the point where the story ultimately reveals what it’s about, which is to say the evolution of the human race. A select number of humans have been chosen as successors to the Star Birds, or another way to interpret it is that the Star Birds are in fact the descendants of humans from a far-off future who have traveled back in time to kickstart their own creation. It’s not totally clear at the end which is supposed to be the case, but either seems possible. Hell, just about anything seems possible. With the doublegangers left on Earth it will be like the Tau people had never left, only their doublegangers are “normal.” Eventually society will return to what it once was. As the scientist who led the study of Tau energy says, “You will leave them your simulacrum, and it will be just what they have wished you to be. They lose only what they hate. They are not robbed.” “They” of course being non-Tau people. The twist being that the Star Birds fostered a small race of superhumans would have been fine on paper circa 1963, but just five years later would’ve been old hat—again, on paper. The execution is what makes this a curious story, even if I find the execution to be unpolished.

A Step Farther Out

Would I suggest this as an introduction to McKenna’s SF? No. Then again if you know of McKenna at all then there’s a good chance you’ve already read “The Secret Place” at the least, which “They Are Not Robbed” feels like a more SFnal counterpart to—not saying “continuation” because I’m not sure which story McKenna would’ve written first. But as a curiosity I would recommend it, as it’s indeed quite strange and does serve as a snapshot of a specific cultural moment in American history, which would’ve already been in the rearview mirror by the time it was published. More than anything I lament McKenna not living longer to hone his craft, and maybe to have taken part in the New Wave, a movement that might’ve suited him. But as things are the New Wave saw only the ghost of the man. One of those missed opportunities in SF history.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Balgrummo’s Hell” by Russell Kirk

July 24th, 2024

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. F&SF, July 1967.)

Who Goes There?

In his lifetime Russell Kirk was known firstly as a conservative political theorist, at a time when American conservatism was still capable of producing intellectuals. His 1953 non-fiction book The Conservative Mind was a seminal political text in its day, although, having been written and published when the Old Right still held sway in government, it now has been seemingly forgotten in a post-Reagan/post-Trump landscape. Kirk was good friends with T. S. Eliot, a fellow conservative and one of the leading members of the Modernist movement; and this may have influenced Kirk to try his hand at literature that would very much stand on its own merits, regardless of the reader’s political biases. Nearly all the fiction Kirk wrote would be supernatural horror, as like M. R. James he seemed uninterested in writing fiction of any other kind, and he would even win the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction for his story “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.” Kirk also appeared semi-regularly in F&SF, and indeed it’s very likely he would’ve never appeared in the genre magazines if not for F&SF‘s mix of classiness and friendliness towards short horror fiction. “Balgrummo’s Hell” is a (relatively) modern take on what would’ve already been a very old tradition in 1967: the Gothic supernatural tale.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Seventeenth Series (ed. Edward L. Ferman), The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (ed. Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan), and the Kirk collections The Princess of All Lands and Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales, the latter seemingly collecting all of Kirk’s ghost stories.

Enhancing Image

Rafe Hogan is a thief, and a pretty good one at that. His latest location for a heist is a secluded mansion in Scotland: Balgrummo Lodging. It’s not exactly a solo job, as his sort-of-girlfriend Nan had gotten hired as a nurse for the mansion and has given Hogan some valuable information as to the treasures lurking inside—namely that the mansion is home to a lot of paintings that would go for a pretty penny on the market, if anyone were to sell them. God knows there’s very little else of value inside, as Alec Fillan Inchburn, the tenth and last baron (he never had children) of Balgrummo Lodging, has sold off everything else of real value for the sake of paying off debts. Alec is extremely old, having not ventured outside his mansion in half a century, having committed an unnamed crime in the years right before World War I and having since been put under a kind of unofficial house arrest. Alec’s only associates now are his niece Euphemia “Effie” Inchburn, T. M. Gillespie, “chairman of the trustees of Lord Balgrummo’s Trust,” and a lone bodyguard at the mansion, Jock Jamieson. There are also nurses who have passed through, to aid the elderly Lord Balgrummo, but Hogan can’t figure for the life of him how these women would’ve lasted more than a week at a time. There aren’t even any guard dogs on the premises. “‘The brutes don’t live long at the Lodging,’ Gillespie had muttered in an obscure aside.” Overall it sounds like this heist shouldn’t be too taxing.

The heist itself only takes up a fraction of the story, most of the wordage being spent on the setup for the heist and the backstory for the mansion, the latter especially contributing to a sense of impending doom—yet we’re kept in the dark as to what kind of doom awaits us. Overall it’s a nonlinear structure, and I’m not totally sure it works out. As far as the action goes it borders on being a one-man show, as once Hogan gets past Jamieson he wanders through the mansion by his lonesome, at night. Kirk might’ve been aware that the actual plot he had conceived would not be able to sustain a short novelette, so he jumps back and forth in time, or rather has Hogan think back on conversations he’d had with Gillespie and Effie, both of whom are fluent in Expositionese. Normally I would fault the exposition-heavy dialogue more, but since the purpose of sucking up to Alec’s associates is to gather info, it makes sense Hogan would be recalling backstory, of which there is a lot. If I had to call “Balgrummo’s Hell” a single word it would be “atmospheric,” which is often used as very polite shorthand for when nothing happens in a story, but at least the vibes are right. It doesn’t help that Hogan is not by any stretch a “hero,” although in his defense he could be more of an outright villain: for example he contemplates murdering Lord Balgrummo while the old man seems to be comatose, but dismisses such a thought as unnecessary cruelty. He’s not exactly a likable protagonist, though, and knowing how Kirk’s worldview operates it becomes too easy to figure out that Our Anti-Hero™ is practically begging to get his just desserts. How he gets his comeuppance is a different story.

“Balgrummo’s Hell” is basically a story about two men who are damned—only one of them doesn’t know it. Something is not right about Balgrummo Lodging, but we’re not told exactly what had happened to make it fall into such decrepitude. There’s a haunting early passage where Hogan is doing location scouting in the neighborhood the mansion is found on, in which the rot of the place seems to have spread like a virus, the rot creeping like a darkness on what is already decaying Scottish urbane landscape. Kirk is a good writer, even if after having read a few of his short stories I don’t consider him that good a storyteller.

Observe:

Beyond the linoleum-factory, he had come upon a remarkably high old stone dyke, unpleasant shards of broken glass set thick in cement all along its top. Behind the wall he had made out the limbs and trunks of limes and beeches, a forest amidst suburbia. Abruptly, a formal ancient pend or vaulted gateway had loomed up. On either side, a seventeenth-century stone beast-effigy kept guard, life-size almost: a lion and a griffin, but so hacked and battered by young vandals as to be almost unrecognizable. The griffin’s whole head was lacking.

I have qualms with the payoff for the mystery, which I’ll get to, but you have to admit Kirk sets things up beautifully. We’re given a location that’s in the midst of crumbling, yet like a dying animal it has become vicious in its own way. Balgrummo Lodging is practically a living thing in itself. We know going in that this is supernatural horror, but the actual supernatural element is alluded to rather than show for almost the entire story, and for me that’s where the sense of dread really comes from. For most of the story nothing strictly supernatural happens, but we know something is wrong. This sense of dread only becomes heightened once Hogan meets Lord Balgrummo face to face, or rather comes upon Lord Balgrummo’s near-lifeless body in his study, the old man having deteriorated physically to the point where he seems unaware of what’s happening around him. One has to wonder how he’s still alive after all this. “But was this penny-dreadful monster of fifty years ago, with his white beard now making him sham-venerable in this four-poster, still among the living?” Yet Alec may well be kept alive by a torment which for him is the never-ending present—a kind of hell that, in line with Kirk’s traditional Catholic conception of punishment, is not a recollection of a horrible past but rather an obliteration of both past and future, so that the present never stops. The explanation for Alec’s condition, courtesy of a flashback with Gillespie, borders on sermonizing, which at this point I’ve come to expect. You can blame it on me being an agnostic, but Kirk’s skill for me is often held back by his sermonizing.

There Be Spoilers Here

Hogan has gone into Lord Balgrummo’s chamber to take a key which only Lord Balgrummo has, which turns out to be a mistake. It’s at this point that we’re told what the supernatural element is, and it ends up being an odd reveal because Hogan had already learned this information before entering the mansion—it’s just that the reader is only learning about it in the climax of the story. I blame myself for not guessing early on, because it’s not a hard twist to figure out; if anything, aside from his tendency to sermonize, Kirk’s biggest flaw as a writer is that he’s not very original when it comes to incorporating horror elements. The reveal that Alec had gotten involved in some horrible pagan ritual may have been a decent twist in 1887, but not so in 1967; nowadays it comes off as tired, but also a little culturally insensitive. So Effie tells us in a flashback:

“[Alec] was out in Nigeria before people called it Nigeria, you know, and in Guinea, and all up and down that coast. He began collecting materials for a monograph on African magic—raising the dead, and summoning devils, and more. Presently he was dabbling in the spells, not merely collecting them—so my father told me, forty years ago. After Uncle Alec came home, he didn’t stop dabbling.”

Lord Balgrummo fucked around and found out, and so for decades now has spent his life in perpetual torment, a torture which will continue until his body expires—and possibly may even continue after his physical death. Whether or not Hogan gets off better is up for debate. The story ends more or less how you think it will, although given the suddenness of the reveal it feels more like a stop than a proper ending. Like I said, Kirk is much better at setting up the mystery than giving us an answer for it, which come to think of it is not unusual for mysteries. I was intrigued for most of the story, but at the end I felt weirdly empty from it.

A Step Farther Out

Gothic narratives always interest me, even if the narrative turns out to be totally derivative and not worth my time. “Balgrummo’s Hell” is worth your time, depending on your appetite for an old-fashioned haunted house story with a religious moral at its center. Kirk clearly held the Gothic tradition in reverence, and line-for-line he’s a more elegant writer than most genre writers in the ’60s—whether he’s able to sustain that elegance for a whole story is yet for me to see. Maybe it has to do with my being allergic to being moralized at. Maybe I’m just not Catholic enough.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Uncollected Works” by Lin Carter

July 20th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, March 1965.)

Who Goes There?

Today I’ll be tackling an SF story by Lin Carter, which might be a bit unfair since Carter wasn’t much of an SF writer. He started out as a fan when he was a teenager, and in the ’50s would start writing genre fiction at the semi-pro level, although he never went on to become an acclaimed writer; on the contrary, Carter would become notorious as one of the worst fantasy writers of the ’60s and ’70s. But then writing wasn’t where his talent lay anyway. While he would be derided for his writing, Carter became arguably the most important fantasy editor of the ’70s, between his role as consulting editor for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and his editing of original and reprint anthologies. “Uncollected Works” was Carter’s first solo professional story, and honestly you could’ve convinced me it was written by someone else, since it’s ostensibly SF and doesn’t have the same overbearing style of his later work. It’s also quite different from later Carter fiction in that it’s not half bad! I had a fun time with it, even if it’s not to be taken too seriously. It would earn Carter his first (and only) Nebula nomination, which itself is not too big an achievement considering every other writer active in 1965 got a nomination that first year of the Nebulas.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1965 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. “Uncollected Works” has only been collected (aha) twice, in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966 (ed. Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim) and the Carter collection Beyond the Gates of Dream. I dare say it’s slightly underrated.

Enhancing Image

This story is technically told in the first person, although at times it reads like second-person since the narrator, an elderly literary critic, is being interviewed by some journalist, and you the reader are in the journalist’s position. So the unnamed narrator is talking directly at us. As someone who used to write short fiction (and may well do so again), I’ve been sort of conditioned to think about how a story is written, down to questions the average reader wouldn’t be asking, such as, “Who is this first-person narrator talking to?” This is all told as a one-sided conversation, with the journalist’s side of the interview being masked by ellipses; we can only infer what we as the reader/journalist are saying. This is the sort of thing you have to consider when writing a short story, and as the narrator admits, writing fiction is not easy work at all. “Pounding a typewriter is hard work, young man, I assure you! Ditch-digging, by comparison, demands far less of one, or so I have been told.” Carter is being a little cheeky here, since obviously he wrote fiction (among other things) for a living and knew perfectly well how grueling it was, even if his narrator claims to not have that experience. There’s also some bitter irony in that Carter’s narrator is an old and respected critic, who is considered at least important enough to be interviewed (consider how many genre SF writers were either never interviewed or were only interviewed very late in their careers), while Carter would die in semi-obscurity and as something of an outcast.

To make a long story short, Carter would not have a very happy life; he died relatively young of cancer, and by that point the fandom around fantasy which he helped build in the US had left him behind. It’s a bittersweet life which produced a bittersweet short story here, although I wanna make it clear the narrator is by no means Carter’s avatar; for one thing the narrator was very much involved in Modernist literature, in the first decades of the 20th century, while I can’t say with certainty that Carter cared for the Modernists at all. The narrator laments Ezra Pound not winning the Nobel, which is a curious sentiment considering Pound was a fascist and his reputation as a poet was and remains divisive. (I mean hey, William Butler Yeats was at the very least a fascist sympathizer and he won the Nobel, so I suppose why not.) On top of past regrets he mentions, the narrator brings up some literary works that sounds made-up, and indeed they’re works that won’t be published yet—the “great” literature of the future the old man won’t live to read. At first we’re led to believe this is all just a figure of speech, but it turns out the narrator is being much more literal. Soon he mentions a story from his youth, while he was staying in Paris—an encounter with a strange older man he only calls “The Gentleman in Green.” They have lunch together and the Gentleman, who has clearly made a good living for himself, considers himself an inventor; he’s been able to live off the royalties of more than a few patents. There is one invention the Gentleman is especially proud of, though, and it came from a new field of mechanics: “Bibliochanics.” The invention itself is called Bibliac, a kind of super-computer, and there is only one of it in the world—the first and last of its kind.

The Gentleman had built Bibliac as a kind of mechanical computer, which can generate letters free of human input, but whose ramblings can be scanned and read with a separate monitor. Bibliac could be thought of as a precursor to the likes of ChatGPT and other chatbots—not true AIs but programs with a prompt-reaction system. Prompt goes in, shit comes out. There are jobs now where you, as someone who can actually write coherent sentences, “work” with chatbots so that they can “learn” to write like actual humans—only now with stolen material. (Do you feel like we’re living in the best of all possible worlds?) Bibliac is less an automatic typewriter and more like a million automatic typewriters feeding into one system, which, ya know, there’s that old saying about how if you had a million monkeys with typewriters you would, at some point, get Shakespeare. The overwhelming majority of the writing would be gibberish, but eventually you would get coherent English and maybe even Shakespeare’s sonnets. Carter seems to have taken this old saying (although maybe it wasn’t so old in 1965) and run with it, since Bibliac similarly prints out gibberish—or at least what looks like gibberish. It takes some time for the Gentleman (this would’ve all happened in the past, mind you) to figure out what Bibliac is actually doing. Upon consulting a linguist friend in academia the Gentleman makes a huge discovery—that the first coherent words generated by Bibliac are Sumerian, one of the oldest known human languages.

“Of course,” says the Gentleman, “no one had ever bothered to work out the logical implications of the fifty-million-monkeys paradox. It would not begin with Montaigne, but with the very beginnings of written literature!” To be fair, neither does Carter totally. There are some logical problems here, which is why I call this story “ostensibly” SF, as it borders on fantasy. Really it’s too soft for most SF but still too rigorous and grounded in reality for fantasy, which you could say makes it perfect for F&SF. (Maybe also Fantastic, but F&SF would’ve paid more.) So, Bibliac progresses through literature, language by language (we’re talking written language), but how does it know to use which alphabet? There are almost as many different alphabets as there are languages. Is kanji included? How would the Gentleman be able to read 99% of this? He claims Bibliac even types out written works that are now lost media, such as the complete works of Sappho, but how would he know it’s Sappho? And would he even be able to read it? The Gentleman has devised a system to scan and sort coherent language from gibberish, but even with this filter it would surely be a nightmare and a half to read all this shit. Surely it’s not work for just one person, yet the Gentleman has been more or less working Bibliac by himself, in an experiment that has now lasted years. Holes like these are inevitable, since SF by its nature has to be founded on at least One Big Lie™, but you see how this can be distracting on reflection, and how “Uncollected Works” borders on fantasy.

There Be Spoilers Here

As for the Gentleman in Green, he was never to be seen again after this chance meeting, having gotten run over and probably killed by a bicyclist right after leaving the narrator. The narrator isn’t sure if he survived, but he never got a name and it’s been decades since that meeting. And yet, so the narrator claims, even without the Gentleman’s input, Bibliac continues to run; by now it will have gone many years ahead into the future of written language, printing out works that have yet to be written by human hands. At the beginning the narrator lists a few future works of literature, but it turns out these were not mere hypotheticals, but real works that the Gentleman had told him about, and which will be written at some point in “our” lifetime, if not the narrator’s. It’s a bittersweet ending, perhaps more sincere than to be expected from so patently ridiculous a story. Of course we don’t even know if what the Gentleman said was true, or even if the narrator is being truthful, but, in that strange convention unique to genre fiction, we have to take these characters at their word. (It’s funny: in “realistic” fiction we’ve become accustomed to unreliable narrators and the possibility of characters keeping secrets, but in genre fiction we’re expected to take everything at face value.) Of course the narrator doesn’t want us to repeat what he’s told us, about Bibliac and its borderline magical power. “…But, if you will, remember those names. Paxton. Chiminez. De Montaubon. Jones, Von Bremen. Sir Edward Marlinson. Tierney.” Some of the great writers of the future. Maybe that’s what Carter really cared about, even for someone who mostly didn’t write science fiction: the future.

A Step Farther Out

Maybe I liked “Uncollected Works” as much as I did because I wasn’t expecting it. I was expecting garbage, truth be told, and instead got a story that’s pretty likable and welcoming, even interesting, if not totally logical. I’ve recently become sort of a fan of Carter’s work as an editor, and obviously as a fan writer myself I feel I should give him some credit, but it must be said that not all of his fiction is bad—maybe just most of it.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Cynosure” by Kit Reed

July 17th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, June 1964.)

Who Goes There?

Kit Reed debuted in the late ’50s, actually part of the generation of women to come after that initial wave in F&SF‘s early years; had she been older or started earlier she would’ve fit right in with the first generation of F&SF‘s “housewives.” But Reed’s career would go beyond the ’50s—way beyond. She would keep writing until her death in 2017, and while she would write the occasional novel, she remains more recognized for her short fiction, and while she was not the prolific writer ever, she did consistently stick with the short story, even when market forces would’ve suggested shifting to novels. I’ve read several of Reed’s stories at this point and I would describe the ones I’ve read as “domestic satire,” including today’s story. Reed’s satires of the nuclear family and the emptiness of middle-class suburbia are more playful than vicious, in that I get the sense that while she had a cynical side she also didn’t resent her station in life. “Cynosure” is entertaining and to some extent an effective satire, but I think it could’ve been even better had it been a little less cartoonish and a little more merciless.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1964 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has since been reprinted in Marriage and the Family Through Science Fiction (ed. Val Clear, Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, and Patricia Warrick), The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (ed. Richard Glyn Jones and A. Susan Williams), and Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1964-1968) (editor not credited), along with the Reed collections The Killer Mice and Weird Women, Wired Women. So you have a few options!

Enhancing Image

Norma Thayer is a housewife, although she’s not exactly a wife anymore, her husband having filed for divorce and left her “when there wasn’t even an Other Woman to take the blame.” Now she lives with her ten-year-old daughter Polly Anne, plus a dog and a cat. This is a lot of responsibility for one woman, especially since Norma and her daughter have just moved into a new neighborhood, maybe in the hopes of turning a new leaf. Norma thinks of herself as a dutiful housewife, never mind being a divorcee; she does all the cooking and cleaning, and on top of that she does her best to keep up with the latest suburban fashion and household appliances. Unfortunately her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Brainerd, remains unimpressed. I was actually confused at first as to whether Mrs. Brainerd is supposed to be a human or an android, since futuristic technology is certainly on the table (as we’ll find out) and Mrs. Brainerd is described as “made of steel” in her introductory scene; but after delving more into the story this description is apparently to be taken metaphorically. Mrs. Brainerd is not actually an android, although she does turn out to have a knack for perfectionism that leads one to think of her as robotic. Despite being demanding and unlikable, Mrs. Brainerd stands as everything Norma aspires to be: she’s “small, slender, lipsticked, and perfumed,” and like Norma she tries to keep up with all the latest gizmos and gossip—except unlike Norma she does this perfectly. How is a single woman supposed to compete with this? How can she handle a kid, a dog, and a cat, and keep a house clean? Unless…

If you’ve read some Kit Reed before then you can guess where this is going. Actually the satirical use of future tech reminds me of Robert Sheckley, had he been a bit less of a misogynist. During one of her pets’ messy accidents (“You Know What”) Norma just so happens to find an advertisement in one of her magazines, which is weird because from what I can tell we’re not told what the name of the product is. Is it supposed to be Cynosure? (By the way, a “cynosure” is basically the center of attention. I’m not sure I’d ever heard of it before, and actually going into the story I assumed it’d be some kind of mythological reference. No dice.) The gizmo at the heart of the story has an unassuming, such that it doesn’t register as future tech—except for its function. “It was a box, small and corrugated, and inside, wrapped in excelsior, was a small, lavender enamel-covered machine. A nozzle and hose, also lavender, were attached.” I imagine it looking like a cross between a vacuum and a leaf blower. The idea is that the dingus lathers material in a liquid which renders the material frozen in place, until it’s unfrozen with a counteracting liquid that comes with the package. And yes, such a liquid would also work on living things. This is one of those inventions where I’m not sure how regulations gave it the green light, or how there wouldn’t be a massive recall once the exploits with such a machine would become obvious. Still, let’s not think too hard about that.

I’ve read that even Reed’s SF can come off as almost like fantasy, and I can see why. The scientific—never mind practical—properties of the gizmo are a little dubious. It may as well be magic. Rather than hard-nosed SF “Cynosure” is much more like a tech fable, as well as a snapshot of life for middle-class whites in the mid-’60s, written before John F. Kennedy’s assassination but published after—only to collide with the Beatles arriving in the US. This is a side of American culture in the ’60s that history has all but forgotten about, if only because nobody remembers the conformists, and Norma is very much a conformist. The need for conformity in the suburbs was and continues to be a fruitful well for ambivalent and satirical storytelling, to the point where poking fun at suburban conformity has itself become a cliche. Of course we hate the suburbs—after all, a lot of us were raised there. I sure was. I recognize Norma in people I grew up with, or rather the parents of those people, the parents (the moms especially) who “kept up appearances,” even if they were getting divorced. It’s tempting, when reading Norma’s interactions with Mrs. Brainerd, to project some homoerotic jealousy onto the relationship; but this was probably not intended. Norma probably doesn’t even see Mrs. Brainerd as a potential friend, but as an ideal to strife for, Mrs. Brainerd posing as the perfect conformist. She doesn’t seem to have a life outside of her “job” as a housewife, her attitude being abrasive but in the service of conformity rather than individuality. Mrs. Brainerd is a robot—metaphorically if not literally. Which does make the ending satisfying!

There Be Spoilers Here

Mrs. Brainerd has been visibly disappointed in her visits, but Norma thinks that with the gizmo she can get everything just right for her neighbor. To her credit, she comes pretty close! She even freezes Polly Anne with the stuff so as to keep her in place during the visit—a tactical move that you have to admit is a bit drastic, but don’t worry, she’s not dead. But still Mrs. Brainerd remains unimpressed. Why? The cake the two women are having has got “that greasy feel.” Well tough shit, huh? Norma has one of those moments—perhaps a bit of a mental break—that would, in different circumstances, result a disgruntled office worker paying management an “unexpected visit.” Don’t worry, the gizmo doesn’t kill Mrs. Brainerd either, although I have to wonder what would happen when she’s eventually unfrozen—if she is unfrozen. Does Norma simply leave her like this? I have a few questions. The vengeance in sweet, though, as Norma and her family pile dirt on the frozen Mrs. Brainerd and the dog even “Did It” on her feet, her face contorted in terror and disgust all the while. There’s a snappiness and just enough of a viciousness in Reed’s style that it’s easy to get wrapped up in Norma’s revenge on her neighbor and possibly even see her as heroic, despite Norma being an anti-heroine at best. Humiliating her neighbor is undoubtedly sadistic to some extent, and yet it’s also framed as a liberating act. Had Norma killed Mrs. Brainerd outright it might’ve crossed the threshold in unintended villainy, but because of the reversable effects of the gizmo it’s easy to think of the ending as like something out of a children’s cartoon.

A Step Farther Out

Purely as a comedy it’s effective enough, but I wish it had been darker, more unsparing. It could be because I grew up in the kind of household described here (except my dad is still very much present in my life, if that means anything), but while the ending is satisfying in its way I was hoping (indeed expecting) Reed to go farther than she did. There’s frustration and vengeance, but ultimately it feels like it was all in good fun. Give Joanna Russ or James Tiptree, Jr. this premise and they could’ve given us some of the bleakest SF of the ’60s. Reed is perhaps an undervalued writer, and especially given her long and winding career it’s easy to think she would explore darker avenues elsewhere. Who’s to say she didn’t?

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” by Miriam Allen deFord

July 13th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, April 1963.)

Who Goes There?

I think I mentioned earlier that I had never read a Miriam Allen deFord story before, which as it turns out is not true. I had read deFord’s savage little story “The Malley System” as part of Dangerous Visions, which is a perfectly dangerous little parable befitting that anthology, despite deFord being the oldest contributor by a good margin. DeFord was born in 1888, which would make her a few years older than the likes of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith; and yet despite her age, as well as not writing fiction regularly until the ’50s, she was by no means a square. This could be because deFord is one of the few openly leftist writers active in the field at the time, with her writing for feminist and socialist outlets going back to the years immediately following World War I. She was also, incidentally, a researcher for Charles Fort, which gave her a connection to genre SF long before she actually started writing SF herself. DeFord’s work is certainly worthy of further study, not least because today’s story, while very short, is a haunting fable that, while ostensibly SF, functions more as ghostly allegory. “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” is not to be missed.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s since been reprinted in the deFord collection Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow, as well as Terrors, Torments and Traumas (ed. Helen Hoke) and Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1964-1968) (editor not credited).

Enhancing Image

The narrator is some four generations removed from the story he’s telling, and by his own admission it “may be partly myth.” There is some truth to it, of course: Jemmy Todd really was the narrator’s grandfather’s grandfather, and Quashee was a real person. Jemmy and Quashee were friends from childhood, but there was one problem: Quashee was a slave. Or rather, Quashee was brought in on a ship as a slave, although as the narrator tells it Jemmy family did buy his freedom at some point. Immediately we’re told that the story we’re about to hear may not be entirely true—not because the narrator is unreliable but because it’s simply part of the passage of time, that things that happened over a century ago will get mixed up as one generation recites to the next—assuming the thing is remembered at all. We’re being told this story in what would’ve presumably then been modern times, but the story itself would take place in the very early 19th century, when slavery was legal in several states in the US, though there was a growing abolitionist movement. The “Deborah Pratt” of the title is a brig that was stationed in New Bedford, the port town where we spend the opening stretch of Moby-Dick and where slavery was illegal at the time. The “Deborah Pratt” and its captain, Captain Pratt, Jemmy’s uncle, brought in slaves across the Atlantic illegally; the ship had to be quite clean of slaves when it returned to New Bedford. Jemmy was an orphan, and as Captain Pratt was the only man able to take the boy in, Jemmy spent time aboard this slave ship. But due to circumstances that could have been foreseen the illicit purpose of the “Deborah Pratt” was to end soon.

(Just a note here, and I’m saying this as a compulsive writer and an amateur editor at heart; but should a ship’s name be italicized or in quotation marks? Usually I see it as the former, but if for example a ship’s name is part of a book title—itself italicized—then the ship’s name will be in quotation marks. But if not part of an italicized title then it seems the ship’s name should be without quotation marks. In the case of deFord’s story it seems she should’ve italicized “Deborah Pratt,” but for the sake of consistency I’m foregoing the italicizing in my review.)

While Captain Pratt worked with his crew, Jemmy would hang around the slaves, especially Quashee, one of the children among them and about Jemmy’s age. The two boys, despite not having a language in common, get along well. “They would laugh together over nothing, draw pictures with sticks in the ground, talk to each other by signs and gestures. There was nobody else around of their own age or near it, so they gravitated together.” This is a small bright spot in what is otherwise a grueling existence, and deFord is merciless with what little wordage she affords herself, as while “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” is not a horror story per se it does gaze, unblinkingly, into what is by its nature an abyss. The slaves are chained together and stripped of their clothing. Those who die mid-voyage are tossed overboard, and even living slaves will be tossed over the side if the “Deborah Pratt” is threatened with being caught with its illegal cargo. For the crew the Africans on the ship don’t represent human life but a monetary investment. The most horrifying passages are not SFnal but historical. You may be wondering, then, how this story takes a turn for the SFnal, and since this story is so short I really have no choice but to tell you now: it’s a blinding disease, a virus which may or may not exist. Something strange and quite disconcerting starts happening with the slaves, in that the adults seem to be losing their eyesight at a rapid pace, their eyes showing “blood-shot whites and sores running with thick, sticky, yellow mucus.” The ship’s solitary doctor doesn’t like the look of this one bit.

DeFord does something unusual with characterization, in that the narrator and (ostensible) protagonist are different people, yet they’re both passive in the story—the unnamed narrator because he’s simply retelling what he’s heard and Jemmy because he was a literal child at the time who didn’t quite know what was happening. The active characters then are Captain Pratt and the doctor, the latter spending much of his time very melancholy and very drunk. The doctor is a curious figure, as he’s clearly ambivalent with the business of slavery but nonetheless chooses to work aboard a slave ship; of course “officially” it’s not for slave-trading, but he’s perfectly aware of where the big money comes from. He even proves perceptive when it comes to the slaves’ mysterious and contagious blindness, saying they’re not really hurting from the failing eyesight but what he calls “nostalgia.” Which came first, the homesickness or the blindness? Did this virus come from Africa or is it not something that can be understood purely through science? The doctor informs the captain that he can’t find a cure for this virus, indeed that it seems to be incurable—and that it can spread easily. So we’re on a ship, in the middle of the ocean, with a virus that could render everyone onboard blind and helpless. The problem is that the slaves cost money, and even if they were to be thrown over now it would be quite costly. (I of course don’t have to mention that doing so would also be a crime against humanity, on top of the slave-trading.) The whites aboard are stuck with their infectious cargo, and things are only about to get worse.

There Be Spoilers Here

Quashee becomes both unchained and allowed to stray from his fellow Africans, which turns out to have spared him from the virus; but then it’s unclear if the virus only has an effect on adults. The adult slaves, which is to say every slave aboard the “Deborah Pratt” aside from Quashee, make the decision among themselves to commit suicide by throwing themselves over the edge as a group. Having lost their sight, both their vision and sight of their homeland, the slaves seem to have come to the conclusion that it’s better to die like this than be brought to the soil of slavers, where they might well be killed for their disability anyway. It’s a disturbing scene, not least because the slaves killing themselves does not stop the virus from spreading to the white crew, and by the time the ship is rescued by a British vessel on the high seas the whole crew (excepting Jemmy) has been rendered “totally and incurably blind.” The conclusion of the story is apparently factual, as the narrator was able to find contemporary newspaper articles on this event happening, although it’s left ambiguous if the crew was rendered blind because of some hitherto unknown virus or if it was perhaps something else. Still, the experience turns Jemmy into an abolitionist; he remains stationed in New Bedford with fellow abolitionists, and even helps in the Underground Railroad. The strange happenings aboard the “Deborah Pratt” had radicalized him. I wonder if something similar had happened with deFord to turn her to socialism as a young adult? Is there, in some metaphorical sense, a tinge of autobiography with this story?

A Step Farther Out

You could gripe about this story, that in-story it’s told by a white man, both from and for a white man’s perspective, and as written by a white women. The black slaves are not given words to speak, to express their anguish verbally, and even Quashee is not really a character. It’s a story about the inherent evil of black slavery, but it’s (probably) not written with the descendants of black slaves in mind. This is a criticism, however, that really can only be made from the standpoint of the present, now over sixty years removed from the story’s publication. As a story presumably written for white readers “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” is stunning in its economy, its ferociousness, and its unsparing use of SF-as-allegory to paint a venomous picture in fewer than ten pages. If the best of deFord is like this then rest assured I’ll be covering her again.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Subcommittee” by Zenna Henderson

July 10th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, July 1962.)

Who Goes There?

In the ’50s and early ’60s there was a group of writers, who really aside from their gender had little in common, whom James Blish called pejoratively the “housewives” of F&SF. Judith Merril, Margaret St. Clair, Kit Reed, Carol Emshwiller, Rosel George Brown, and not the least of these, Zenna Henderson. She did appear elsewhere, but nearly all of her fiction appeared in the pages of F&SF, and unlike some of her contemporaries she didn’t turn to writing novels once market forces demanded it. I’ve read a few Henderson stories before, but until now I’ve not given much thought as to what goes into her writing. You could say time has been somewhat uncharitable to Henderson’s work; aside from her work being out of print, her output went down after the early ’70s, possibly because the field had changed so radically that there was no place for someone of her disposition. It’s hard to say. ISFDB lists only two interviews with Henderson, both from the ’70s, and the interviewer is the same fucking guy (Paul Walker, but not that one) in both cases. “Subcommittee” is a somewhat feminist story that probably would not have been impressive ten years after publication. Here we have a first contact story that’s unquestionably Henderson, for both good and ill: it’s a subversion of militaristic alien encounter narratives of the era, even if it still comes off as implicitly conservative. You’ll see what I mean.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was reprinted in The 8th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F (ed. Judith Merril), Gentle Invaders (ed. Hans Stefan Santesson), Young Extraterrestrials (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow (ed. Forrest J. Ackerman, Janrae Frank, and Jean Marie Stine), as well as the Henderson collections The Anything Box and Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson.

Enhancing Image

A human (read: American) fleet has come into contact with a fleet of alien ships, or rather the alien ships have brought the party to the humans. The Linjeni are a somewhat humanoid race, albeit covered in fur, like a race of Sasquatches. Serena is a wife and mother, whose husband Thorn is one of the generals aboard the human fleet, and so far things are not looking too good. The problem is that nobody has any idea what the other side is trying to communicate, and while the civilians on both sides are kept safe on a nearby beach, the civilians of both sides are separated by a fence. Officially Serena is not allowed to communicate with the civilians on the other side, and vice versa. The Linjeni are here for a reason—maybe for innocuous reasons, maybe to pick a fight with the humans. Serena already has her work cut out for her, but she soon discovers her son Splinter (get it? Thorn? Splinter?) has dug a hole under the fence so he can hang out with Doovie, a child of the alien race, in secret. On the one hand it’s hard to blame Splinter for wanting such attention, since as Serena points out he’s the only human child in the human party; but still, making direct contact with the Linjeni could have very bad consequences; this being a Henderson story, however, we can guess in advance that the consequences can’t be too bad. Personally I’d be more concerned about contracting or spreading disease when interacting with an alien race, but who am I to judge?

Despite being published in the ’60s “Subcommittee” very much feels like a leftover from the ’50s, and while I do love me some ’50s genre SF I can’t say I was taken with this one. Despite featuring a few main characters there’s only one character in the Shakespearean sense, in that she has some kind of inner life, which would be Serena. We actually get some insight into what Serena is thinking, although it isn’t much. Splinter is a gosh-wow caricature, a pretty common sort that would’ve been the standard for writing children characters in the field then, while the aliens lack individual personalities. Even “Mrs. Pink” (nicknamed for her pink fur), Serena’s counterpart, is a character who sort of exists simply for the sake of the plot. Now, as for the adult male characters, there are only two: Thorn, and another general of the fleet whose name is unimportant. The men, when we do see them, are irrational, panicky creatures whose whole thought processes are hijacked by fears of all-out war with the aliens. These too are caricatures, although I do think Henderson intended for us to take them as such anyway, as opposed to as real characters. The men have to be warmongers so that Serena can not only come out looking all the better but devise a solution, with a little help from her son of course. This is a problem story with two basic questions: “How can we start to understand the aliens’ language?” and “What do these aliens want?” These questions are naturally conjoined at the hip: once you answer the first you can then answer the second.

Once they brought up knitting I knew it was over. Serena becomes an accomplice to Splinter and starts making friends with Mrs. Pink and the other female aliens. At first they aren’t able to communicate with even the most basic words, but thankfully actions will usually do the trick where words fail, and so it doesn’t take long for the humans and aliens to find a common ground. This is all done, of course, in secret, behind Thorn’s back, since he wouldn’t understand things women do together when they’re bored, and anyway, an ill-timed revealing of the connection between the races could prove catastrophic. Still one thing is certain: the Linjeni are not the enemy. I’m about to go on a rant about this story’s politics, but before I do that I wanna give credit where credit is due, in that this is very much an anti-xenophobia narrative. Hostility towards the aliens is consistently framed as misguided at best. When I say Henderson’s brand of “feminism” is actually conservative I don’t mean this in how we modern Americans understand “conservatism,” which is xenophobic and anti-intellectual—a crippling fear of the abnormal. Henderson doesn’t fear the abnormal so much as she embraces the normal, to the point of trying to connect with marginalized groups on the basis of “normalcy.” She worked with interned Japanese-Americans during World War II, which probably contributed to her accepting view of minority groups—assuming we’re supposed to take the Linjeni as a stand-in for minority groups.

There Be Spoilers Here

It turns out the Linjeni are a dying race, and the reason they’ve come to Earth is that our planet is incredibly rich in salt water (indeed it takes up the majority of the planet’s surface), and salt is something the Linjeni need to survive. Their own planet has run dry on the stuff, and the survivors have become a collective of vagabonds. “The Linjeni must have come seeking asylum—or demanding it. Neighbors who were afraid to ask—or hadn’t been given time to ask.” If the human fleet were to strike now they would be committing genocide, unbeknownst to the men aboard. The moral implications of the situation might’ve been more fleshed out in the hands of a different writer (but then, maybe not), but regardless we aren’t given much time to dwell on this before Serena and Splinter swoop in to save the day, managing to reason with the human fleet’s high command and prevent what would’ve been a very costly war. (I should mention at some point that this story moves fairly quickly, which I guess is a positive. It’s classified as a novelette, but if so it barely counts.) The nuclear family is such a sacred model (Henderson supposes) that it can serve as common ground for two sentient races who can barely understand each other through words. Of course it would be astronomically good luck (or bad) for humanity to make contact with a fellow intelligent race in the universe, but to have said race not only be somewhat humanoid but conventionally monogamous? That must be like hitting the jackpot ten times over. Imagine the odds. Of course I’m being a little unfair here, but our emotions are never fair and always in the direction of the wind, and reading the climax of this story I couldn’t help but feels like I’d been cheated in some way.

A Step Farther Out

It’s… cute. So naturally I wasn’t a fan. Sorry. (I will admit I’m one of those few unhappy people who found This Is How You Lose the Time War to be too saccharine for my liking.) It’s easy to poke fun at, but then so is anything that is earnest, and I do think Henderson (between this and her other stories I’ve read) was being earnest if nothing else. It must’ve been really something, in the ’60s, to go from the invention of The Pill™ at the start of the decade to, by the end of it, seeing feminism not only advance rapidly but splinter into some very interesting and intellectually demanding schools of thought. Henderson’s “feminism,” if it can really be called that, is totally lacking in intersectionality, and its cloying admiration of the nuclear family model now reads as like nails on a chalkboard. And yet, I don’t think a male chauvinist, especially of the time, could’ve written “Subcommittee,” which in itself should be worth something.

See you next time.