(Cover by Allen Anderson. Planet Stories, January 1951.)
A change is coming to this site, and unfortunately it’s not for the better. I was supposed to review Leigh Brackett’s The Big Jump last month, but while I had finished reading the novel on time, I could not bring myself to write anything all that substantive about it. It’s fine, basically. It’s a short novel that is sort of spacefaring but decidedly unlike the swashbuckling planetary romances Brackett had made her bread and butter. Novels, for the most part, were also not really her strong suit, which makes her 1955 novel The Long Tomorrow all the more an outlier. I wanted to write about Brackett still, though, so this month we’ll be downsizing and looking at a short story of hers from earlier in her career, “The Halfling,” which got a Retro Hugo nomination. It’s also not a planetary romance, though; instead Poul Anderson, who for a time early in his career wrote some Brackett-esque science-fantasy, will take up that mantel. Incidentally I was supposed to write about an Anderson novella sometime last year, but never got around to it, so I’ll be making up for lost time.
The increasing habit I’ve made of missing out on pieces I had set out to cover has made me think this site could use some downsizing of its own. Thankfully not much will change except, sad to say, I will no longer be covering “complete” novels, i.e., stories 40,000 words or longer that are printed whole in magazine issues. This was a niche department to begin with, which I would only make use of a few times each year, but it seems with my life circumstances in mind that such a department is no longer viable. Of course, I’ll still be covering novels in serial form (indeed we have one such novel for this month), but the Complete Novels section you see at the top of the page of now dead. Those reviews will be kept up, because why not, but I will no longer be updating that department for the foreseeable future. Instead I will simply not post anything on the 31st of the month going forward, which gives me a bit of extra time to relax as well as the previous post more time to marinate at the top of the page. Really I think this is the best move for everyone, and I also think the price for no longer reviewing such stories is a rather small one.
July will see all short stories from Amazing Stories, but for this month it’s pretty much just more of the same. Nothing unusual here. Aside from Brackett and Anderson, authors I’d meant to cover earlier but couldn’t, we have the serial version of Gordon R. Dickson’s first major novel, as well as a novella from Katherine MacLean and an out-of-left-field SF-horror yarn from the now-obscure Raymond F. Jones. I had temporarily forgotten about my thing of reviewing as least one piece from Amazing Stories this month and almost replaced Jones with a Bruce Sterling Omni story. But Sterling is gonna have to way a bit, probably a few months.
We’re leaning vintage this month, with one story from the 1940s, three from the 1950s, and one from the 1960s.
For the serial:
Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1959. Born and raised up to a point in Canada, but moving with his family to the US when he was 13, Dickson can now strike one as oddly mild-mannered and sympathetic for being a major forerunner of what we now call military SF. The Childe Cycle, which contains the Dorsai stories, would encompass his life’s work, although he never lived to give it a proper ending. Dorsai! was not the first story in the cycle, but apparently the second, as well as the first novel. The magazine version was nominated for a Hugo.
For the novellas:
“The Diploids” by Katherine MacLean. From the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. MacLean was one of the last major discoveries John W. Campbell had made, and indeed she would appear regularly in Astounding/Analog over the course of many years. Despite living an exceedingly long time (she died in 2019), she mostly stopped writing after the 1970s. She trained in psychology and had apparently taken in interest in Dianetics at one point.
“Witch of the Demon Seas” by Poul Anderson. From the January 1951 issue of Planet Stories. Anderson was another Astounding/Analog regular, although he also appeared basically everywhere else. Born American but raised by Danish immigrants, there’s a strong sense of the “Nordic twilight” in Anderson’s writing, especially but not exclusively his later work. Early in his career he followed in the footsteps of Leigh Brackett and wrote some planetary romances.
For the short stories:
“The Halfling” by Leigh Brackett. From the February 1943 issue of Astonishing Stories. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novelette. Instead of reviewing a novel I guess we’ll settle for something more small-scale. Brackett had made her debut in 1940, in Astounding, but she quickly turned to other magazines despite the lesser pay. She would eventually find much success as a screenwriter.
“Stay Off the Moon!” by Raymond F. Jones. From the December 1962 issue of Amazing Stories. Born and raised in Utah, Jones seems to have been the first Mormon SF writer of note, so in that sense he was ahead of his time. He was active through much of the ’40s and ’50s. Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may recognize him for having written This Island Earth (the novel, not the movie).
Karen Joy Fowler was born in 1950, in Indiana, but her family then moved to California. She came to writing in her thirties, with a flurry of short stories in the latter half of the ’80s; looking at her bibliography, it looks like she wrote about half of her short stories over a five-year span. Fowler is almost certainly the most high-profile talent to have made her debut in the annual Scientology-backed Writers of the Future anthology series, although to my knowledge she is not a Scientologist. (Incidentally today’s story is centered around a cult.) Over the past few decades she’s found success writing both SFF and non-genre fiction, with her 2004 novel The Jane Austen Book Club becoming a mainstream bestseller and the audience for it probably being unaware that most of what Fowler’s written (at least at short lengths) has been science fiction and fantasy. Speaking of which, she hasn’t written too much short fiction since the early ’90s, but funnily enough what she began to lack in quantity she made up for in quality. “Always” won the Nebula for Best Short Story and got nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, despite the lack of a Hugo nomination. It marked Fowler’s first appearance in Asimov’s in ten years, and is not science fiction at all but rather a drama with an unexplained fantasy element.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April-May 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition (ed. Rich Horton), Year’s Best SF 13 (ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer), and the Fowler collection What I Didn’t See and Other Stories.
Enhancing Image
Something that only occurred to me after the fact is that we never get the narrator’s name in this. The narrator, who at least started out as a 17-year-old girl, gets kicked out of her mom’s house and decides to hit the road with Wilt, her sort-of-friend-sort-of-boyfriend who’s nearly a decade older than her, and the two make their way to Always. This is in 1938. Always is a commune that was founded in the 1920s by one Brother Porter, who’s of indeterminate age of who is at least old enough to have a 14-year-old son. “I can’t tell you how old Brother Porter was, because he always said he wouldn’t give an irrelevant munber the power of being spoken out loud. He was a fine-looking man though. A man in his prime.” Right away we’re given the impression that Brother Porter is a suspicious man, who claims the ability to grant immortality (in the sense that people do not age) despite not having any apparent means of doing so, and more importantly the fact that he keeps the men and women (even the married couples) of the town in separate dorms and solicits sex from the latter group. Apparently the men are supposed to take some vow of celibacy. Homosexuality is not allowed. Drinking’s not allowed either, although less as a rule and more something that’s treated as a social taboo. So Always is a dry town. The townsfolk work jobs, but are supposed to give Brother Porter their paychecks, which begs the question of what the point of money here is. This is not a utopian socialist commune, but rather a society based in religion.
Indeed there’s very little that can be considered utopian about Always, even just from the first few pages of what is always a brief story. A society in which both hard drinking and free love are taboo, and yet one in which money is still a thing, is surely not a society that can be worth much of a damn. There’s also the fact that most of the people in town are much older than the narrator, ranging from middle-aged to elderly. A society predominantly comprised of people who are of retirement age or close to it surely can’t be much to write home about either. The husbands who live here are also strangely fine with getting cucked by the resident cult leader, and said cult leader (so we’re told by a few characters) also just so happens to be very good at sex. This all sounds implausible, but then you could look at just about any cult that’s taken off in the real world, whether it be Heaven’s Gate or the Church of Scientology, and wonder how any mature and rational person could buy into such a thing. Yet it has happened and continues to happen, despite our rationality telling us that this can’t be. “Always” is partly about cults and how a cult might sprout from the filthy mud of some person’s imagination, but it’s more focused on the alienation that seems to happen inevitably between cult followers and the rest of the world. In real life this alienation takes the form of a subtle change in personality, in a person’s outlook, but here Fowler treats it more literally. Consider, for one, the narrator’s anxiety about not aging:
At first. Brother Porter discouraged field trips, and then later we just found we had less and less in common with people who were going to die. When I complained about how old everyone else at Always was, Wilt pointed out that I was actually closer in age to some seventy-year-old who, like me, was going to live forever, than to some eighteen-year-old with only fifty or so years left. Wilt was as good with nmnbers as he was with cars and he was as right about that as everything else.
Once the townsfolk become convinced they will live forever they start perceiving time in a different and strange way, and the narrator is not immune to this. Of course, another question is why you would want to live forever if you’re already elderly and with one foot in the grave. Surely nobody would want to be old for the rest of eternity. There’s an old lady here, Winnifred Allington, who constantly complains about her arthritus, something that will never go away no matter how long she lives. Imagine having your joints ache and burn for a hundred years. This doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me. Wilt eventually agrees, because he leaves Always in 1941, when the US gets directly involved in WWII, and never returns. He seems to have the right idea. It would be ironic, at least, if Wilt were to get killed in the war, but instead he comes out of it just fine. The narrator, meanwhile, goes through a change, her mind not so much eroding as slowing down to the slowness of glacier—not that she becomes dumber, but rather she stops caring about normal human things. She stops getting attached to the animals at the zoo. She stops reading books and listening to music for fun. She even stops partaking in Always social life, since she stops seeing her fellow immortals as people and more as machines that are programmed to do and say the same things each day. There’s nearly a whole page of her just listing things the immortals repeat on a regular basis, probably without realizing how dull they themselves are.
I’ve seen reprints and other reviews called “Always” science fiction, but I’m not sure how it qualifies. It barely even counts as fantasy, never mind SF. The immortality trick Brother Porter pulls is never given an explanation—neither an SFnal nor supernatural one. The only maybe-supernatural thing that happens is that maybe the narrator doesn’t age over the course of several years; but the passage of time is vague enough, and we’re given so little as to the narrator’s own appearance, that we’re not sure if she’s still physically a teen girl by the end. Never mind that it’s off-putting that Brother Porter takes her on as a sexual partner despite being at least old enough to be her dad, and nobody in-story questions this. There is, in fact, very little that the characters come to question or wonder about. The only speculation that occurs is how the story observes the narrator’s changing mentality, in that Fowler speculates on how even the assumption of immortality might change someone’s attitude toward life over a period of years. Why act fast if you have more time than you could possibly know what to do with? Here’s a memorable passage detailing the narrator’s mindset, in a story that, to its credit, has its share of zingers:
I talked less and less. At first, my brain tried to make up the loss, dredging up random flashes from my past—advertising slogans, old songs, glimpses of shoes I’d worn, my mother’s jewelry, the taste of an ant I’d once eaten. A dream I’d had in which I was surrounded by food that was bigger than me, bread slices the size of mattresses, which seems like it should have been a good dream, but it wasn’t. Memories fast and scattershot. It pleased me to think my last experience of mortahty would be a toothpaste commercial. Clood-bye to all that.
Then I smoothed out and days would go by when it seemed I hardly thought at all. Tree time.
She becomes less like a human being, but unlike her fellow immortals she becomes more like a tree rather than a machine. She becomes more connected to nature. For all the strangeness of Always, the locale is very nice, as it’s located near the California coast and people are allowed to venture outside the town. So that’s something.
There Be Spoilers Here
Nothing lasts forever—not even the town where the people are supposed to live forever. It shouldn’t be surprising that the party must end, although how it ends is a bit funny. One of the more eccentric immortals, Frankie Frye, got the bright idea to test Brother Porter’s immortality by poisoning him. She didn’t do this out of malice, mind you, but as a genuine act of faith. “[Frankie] was so worked up and righteous, she made the rest of us feel we hadn’t ever had the same faith in Brother Porter she’d had or we would have poisoned him ourselves years ago.” Of course, it’s hard to feel bad for the man, since he was like a less pedophilic David Koresh. Being immortal, it turns out, does not mean you can’t be killed. The result is sort of a chain reaction, in which some more immortals get killed in horrible and inexplicable ways. The faith the collective had held had been broken. Ultimately the only person who decides to stay in Always is the narrator—a fact that she doesn’t seem to mind much. She has the trees and mountains for company, after all. (I guess this is supposed to be a bittersweet ending.)
A Step Farther Out
I wasn’t a fan, sorry. When it comes to fantasy fiction I’m fine with the lack of a “why” in the storytelling, but at some point the deliberate ambiguity the author invokes as to what is happening is supernatural or not that wearies me such that I stop wondering at all. Instead I start wondering about other things, these things having to do with the logic of the story, and that’s when it stops being fun. You can certainly poke holes in the fabric of “Always,” even with it being so concise, but the problem is that I should not feel compelled to poke holes in the story if I’m enjoying it enough. I feel as if Fowler had an idea, and something of a vignette to go with the idea, but it’s so lacking in “why” and “how” that it threatens to evaporate. I’m a little confused as to the Nebula win, as well as why multiple sources call it science fiction, because it seems as if we had read different stories. In fairness to Fowler, she’s quite good at dialogue and internal monologues, which I already knew from other short stories of hers I’ve read—just that in the case of “Always” I feel like this talent was in service of slight material.
(Cover by Michael Whelan. Amazing Stories, November 1982.)
Who Goes There?
John Milo Ford (his friends called him Mike) was born in 1957 in Indiana, but later became a Minneapolis denizen. He was one of those rare literary prodigies, having made his first sale when he was only 18 and with his debut novel, Web of Angels, published when he was only 23. Unlike a lot of authors who specialize in one or two modes of writing, Ford was more of a jack of all trades, writing novels, short stories, poetry, speculative articles, and even designing tabletop games. It could be this versatility, combined with the fact that Ford’s work can at times be demanding by genre fiction standards, that might explain his perpetual obscurity. Not helping things was the years-long question of who owned his work, since apparently nobody had gotten in touch with the next of kin after Ford’s death, and so for over a decade his work was allowed to fall out of print. It was only since 2019 that Tor, Ford’s publisher, was able to contact the estate and gradually bring his books back into print. Sadly Ford died young, at just 49, after a long battle with chronic illness, including having to get a kidney transplant; this chronic illness also goes to explain why he wrote rather little in the last decade or so of his life. Even with Tor’s recent efforts, Ford will probably always remain an object of small but passionate interest.
In the late ’70s through the early ’80s, Ford appeared frequently in Asimov’s, while George H. Scithers was editor. The two had such a good partnership that when Scithers left and became editor of the cheaper and less prestigious Amazing Stories, Ford started appearing there as well. “The Persecutor’s Tale” is one of Ford’s longer short stories, which isn’t saying a whole lot, but as with his novels, it’s a little on the dense side. It’s also very rewarding. This is an allegorical fantasy yarn about justice in a quasi-medieval world where the God of Abraham seems to have gone out for lunch. As is typical with Ford at his best, it demands a second reading.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the November 1982 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s only been reprinted twice, in Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (ed. Darrell Schweitzer and George H. Scithers) and the Ford collection Heat of Fusion and Other Stories. Both are out of print.
Enhancing Image
In the days of the Empire, a group of travelers are forced to stop at a mountainside inn for the night, and not just any night but Midwinter’s Eve. The story is vague as to where or when we are, but certainly it can’t be Earth’s history as we know it. We have cars and electric lighting, but also centurions and a pair of mules dragging the run-down car to a stable. There’s also at least one profession that simply does not have a real-world equivalent, but we’ll get to that in a moment. The narrator claims to be a journalist, just another inoccuous observer who’s interested in other people’s stories. The other people in the group include a centurion, a Guardsman, an electrical engineer, a “chymist” (this suggests alchemy being a legit practice in the world of the story), and a justice and her two clerks. The justice, strangely, dons a blindfold, while her clerks help her move about and whisper things to her. It’s a literal take on the old saying that justice is blind. There is one last member of the group, though, a gaunt man who claims to be a persecutor. This bums out everyone else, including the innkeeper, who says the persecutor revealing his own profession as such is “unjust.” It’s not clear right away what a persecutor is, but we can tell from characters’ reactions that it’s not a well-liked job, even if it’s backed by the state. The innkeeper convinces the gaunt man that he owes them a story.
The gaunt man spends much of the story recounting the tale of a young man who, along with his lover, committed a horrid act that was however beyond the reach of the law, and “deeds were done in darkness, and things were thrown into deep water.” It’s just as vague as to what this horrid act could’ve been, or why the state police would be unable to reprimand the young man for it. Still, it was a job for the persecutor, who is not a cop or even secret police, but something else. Soon the persecutor is on the young man, hounding him, even in his bedroom in the dead of night. The young man realized that someone had betrayed him and that the persecutor would now follow him wherever he went, maybe hound him into suicide. “And sometimes, on his cot, in the deepest night, snakeskin would brush his cheek, and the persecutor’s bone mask would hover above him.” Whether the persecutor is actually there or not would be missing the point, since the effect is meant to be more psychological than physical. No matter where the young man goes, even if he changes his name and clothes, he still sometimes sees, even in broad daylight, the cloak and skull mask of the persecutor. Driven nearly mad, the young man at one point “maimed himself, in a bloody and dreadful manner,” which might be alluding to castration. It’s probably best that we don’t get the details.
So the tale ends. The young man is still out there, somewhere. Has he paid for his crime? The persecutor posits that maybe he hasn’t. Certainly the young man had paid with blood and flesh, but as the persecutor says, “Blood is nothing, flesh is nothing. Flesh and blood are wracked with iron, in the halls of physical justice. But iron cannot touch the spirit that sets itself above justice.. So, the persecutor is not a cop or the blindfolded justice at the inn, but instead the justice he seeks is spiritual. There’s a spiritual debt that the young man has not yet paid.
Reading back through passages of “The Persecutor’s Tale,” I do have to wonder if Ford was a Christian, as it very much has the ring of Christian allegory. More specifically I was thinking of the more allegorical stories of Gene Wolfe, whom Ford certainly would’ve read, and incidentally Wolfe also admired Ford’s fiction. Even more specifically I’ve been thinking of Wolfe’s “The Detective of Dreams,” which is ostensibly an eerie mystery yarn, but which ultimately reveals itself to be (and indeed can be best understood as) an extended metaphor for Wolfe’s idea of Catholic fear and forgiveness. There’s a long-running tradition among Christian authors, from Dostoevsky to Flannery O’Connor, with exploring the implications of justice in a world where not every crime will be punished and not every criminal will fall into the jaws of the law. There is, of course, “the law,” and then there is God’s law, as in the God of the Bible. Granted, it’s also possible Ford explored this subject matter less as a believer and more in the name of hunting intellectual big game. I’m not a Christian myself, or even religious at all, but I would not say such material would be off the table. This is the same guy who wrote The Dragon Waiting, which is set in a decidedly unchristian Europe where Julian the Apostate lived to overthrow Christianity as the dominant religion of Rome. (Also there are vampires, but read the book to find out more about that.) Similarly the world of “The Persecutor’s Tale” is one where something had changed, so that you have this intermingling of modern and archaic technology, bordering on steampunk.
Ford understood the assignment when writing this story, in that he knew what kind of story he wanted to write and how much he wanted to flesh out the details around the central allegory. None of the characters have names, and the time and place of the action are kept rather unspecified. The details of the world around the story don’t really matter. There’s some question over whether “The Persecutor’s Tale” counts as science fiction or fantasy; for myself I think of it as belonging to the latter genre. Sure, Amazing Stories was primarily an SF magazine, but after its sister magazine Fantastic folded in 1980 there was an opening for fantasy in its pages. It probably also helps that by 1983 TSR was publishing Amazing Stories. (That’s right, the Dungeons & Dragons company.) Ford doesn’t speculate on humanity’s future here so much as invent a somewhat outlandish altered Earth for the sake of providing a backdrop for an allegory about the need for justice. Historically, one thing that’s separated SF and fantasy is that the former tends toward the literal while the latter leans toward the metaphorical. The most popular works of fantasy fiction, going back to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and even the Book of Revelations (it is a work of allegorical fantasy, sorry), have been either understood as extended metaphors or as stories much given to metaphor and symbolism. “The Persecutor’s Tale” seems, at first, to be about the need for a vengeful Old Testament God, the God who allowed Job to be tortured and his family killed; but Ford has a neat little trick up his sleeve that throws this interpretation into question.
There Be Spoilers Here
There are a couple signs early on that the narrator is not who he appears to be, but the reader is unlikely to pick up on these signs, such as a tan line on the ring finger and the narrator’s tendency to stroke two of his fingers together in a specific gesture. It’s only after the gaunt man has finished his story and everyone’s gone to bed that the narrator reveals himself to be, in fact, the very persecutor the gaunt man was posing as. He takes a cloak and skull mask out of his bag and goes to stalk the gaunt man in the dead of night. It’s become apparent by night that the gaunt man and the young man in the tale are the same person, and that it’s actually no coincidence that the “journalist” and the gaunt man shared a car on their way to the city. The haunting of the young/gaunt man never ended—the good news being that it’s about to. With a “tiny silver pipe” in his throat to disguise his voice and a “heavy silver ring with its swirling fire opal” on his ring finger, the persecutor gets to work. What happens next is what really makes reading this story worth the effort, in that it’s both strange and very symbolic. At the same time there’s a bit of pathos with the ending. Even in this section I don’t feel like giving the whole game away. You should take twenty or so minutes out of your day and read it for yourself.
A Step Farther Out
Yeah, this is a good one, but then I also expected that. Nearly everything I’ve read by Ford has impressed me, or at least given me the impression that a second reading would be well worth the effort. It’s funny, because both Ford and Wolfe are known to be difficult by genre standards; but whereas Wolfe has long since found a passionate (if at times annoying and even fascist) following, there does not seem to be such a crowd among today’s readers for Ford. It could be because his novels are all either one-offs or media tie-ins (he actually wrote a couple Star Trek novels), because he died young, because for more than a decade his work was all out of print, or maybe the fact that while he certainly was active (very much so) in fandom, SFF fandom nowadays is so different than when Ford was alive that it all feels like a time capsule. At the same time there’s a reason why so many of his fellow writers admire his work, and similarly I’m championing him.
We are now knee-deep in spring, which means last month I narrowly survived a fit of allergies. (I’m not really exaggerating, I got hit with what the doctor called postnasal drip, and for some days it was difficult to even breathe, let alone sleep at night.) In terms of weather this might be my least favorite time of year, because of said allergies. In better news, it’s also time for applying for memberships at the yearly Worldcon, if you’re interested. This one is happening in LA, which is unfortunate because it’s the other side of the country for me and I don’t have any connections who live close enough to where the action’s happening. I have a few friends in California, but as you know, California is a big state. (That’s not even getting into people from outside the US who want to attend in person. It’s rough.) I did end up getting a WSFS membership, I think for the third year in a row. I mainly do this for all the free stuff you get, a very good I would say given it’s only $50. You get ebooks of novels and short fiction, and you even get files for the movies up for Best Dramatic Presentation.
As for what we’ll be reading this month, for the first time in a long while we have a complete novel, which I have to get around to this time. (Unlike last time.) We also have a novel in serialized form, by someone whom I’m sure will not raise any eyebrows. Incidentally, two of the stories here are related to World War II, although one was written on the eve of the war in Europe while the other is an early example of a “Hitler wins” alternate history. Such a scenario is pretty tired today, but it was not so when C. M. Kornbluth came up with it back in the ’50s. Another funny connection is that both Kornbluth and L. Ron Hubbard served in WWII, the former in the army and the latter in the navy. Hubbard’s time in the navy was respectable, and I’m sure nothing untoward or embarrassing happened when he was at sea. Unfortunately for Kornbluth, his time in the army caused a weakness in his heart that would later see him die quite young.
Anyway…
We have one story from the 1940s, two from the 1950s, one from the 1980s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.
For the serial:
Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, April to June 1940. Where do we even start with Hubbard? One of the most controversial figures in not just SF but also modern religion and pseudo-science. Hubbard had Dianetics published in 1950, and in 1952 he founded the Church of Scientology, one of the most successful (if only because of the disproportionate number of rich people in its ranks) cults in recorded history. Before all that, he was a fairly respected genre writer, with the late ’30s and early ’40s marking his peak for both quality and quantity. Final Blackout is probably the most well-received of Hubbard’s SF novels, after the much more famous but also more controversial Battlefield Earth.
For the novellas:
“The Giants of the Violet Sea” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. From the September-October 2021 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Born and raised in Greece, and indeed currently living there, Triantafyllou writes her fiction in English. Her personal website says she has “a flair for dark things.” She made her debut in 2017, and so far has only written short fiction. This here novella is the longest work of Triantafyllou’s to have been published up to that point.
“Two Dooms” by C. M. Kornbluth. From the July 1958 issue of Venture Science Fiction. Kornbluth is maybe one of my favorite SF writers to have really flourished during the ’50s magazine boom-and-bust, although he had made his debut long before that. He was a prodigy whose earliest work was published when he was a literal teenager. Unfortunately he also died very young, at just 34, from a weak heart, robbing the field of one of its most incisive writers.
For the short stories:
“The Persecutor’s Tale” by John M. Ford. From the November 1982 issue of Amazing Stories. Speaking of very good writers gone too soon, Ford also made his debut when only in his teens, but he picked up on the trade pretty quickly. A writer’s writer, the best way to read a Ford novel is the read it twice. Sadly he died in 2006, at just 49, having not quite completed his final novel.
“Always” by Karen Joy Fowler. From the April-May 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Nebula winner for Best Short Story. Believe it or not, there’s an L. Ron Hubbard connection here. Fowler is maybe the most high-profile author to have made her debut in the annual (and Scientology-backed) Writers of the Future anthology series, although Fowler herself is not a Scientologist.
For the complete novel:
The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett. From the February 1953 issue of Space Stories. While Brackett’s first few stories were published in Astounding, she soon moved to other magazines that were more open to her brand of space adventure SF. By the end of World War II she’d come to be associated most with Planet Stories, in a mutually beneficial relationship. Indeed, after Edgar Rice Burroughs, Brackett can be considered the leading writer of planetary romance. She married fellow writer Edmond Hamilton in 1946, but they almost never collaborated. Nowadays she’s best known as a successful screenwriter, and for her grounded SF novel The Long Tomorrow, which is quite different from what she most often wrote. The Big Jump is a short novel, apparently published in magazine form unabridged, and later as one half of an Ace Double along with Philip K. Dick’s Solar Lottery.
Brian Aldiss was born in England in 1925, and he actually lived a very long time, dying literally one day after his 92nd birthday. He starting writing SF in the mid-’50s, being a generation younger than that first wave of British authors to write magazine SF like Arthur C. Clark and John Wyndham, and yet also a generation older than the New Wave crowd he would later fall in with. And whereas Clarke and Wyndham wanted popularity, preferably on both sides of the Antlantic, Aldiss had other ideas. Unfortunately by the late ’50s, when Aldiss’s work was appearing in the US, the magazine market was in the midst of a collapse; but the good news was that The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was thriving and also the perfect outlet for his fiction, said fiction being sort of dark and literary. The Hothouse stories, which were published in F&SF throughout 1961, were probably Aldiss’s most ambitious project up to that point. The series (but not the fix-up novel, which in the US was actually a bit shorter than the UK and magazine versions) won him a Hugo. It’s only been, what… ten months since I reviewed the previous entry in the series? Seems like only yesterday. We’re almost done here, since “Timberline” is the penultimate story. It’s also, unfortunately, the weakest entry in the series so far.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s never been reprinted outside of Hothouse, which makes sense because if you were to hop into this story without having read what came before it, you would be lost.
Enhancing Image
Remember Poyly? Maybe not. She died near the end of “Undergrowth,” and rather unceremoniously, despite having been Gren’s love interest for a minute. Gren himself doesn’t seem too troubled or grief-stricken by this. In fact, I’m struggling to recall if “Timberline” mentions her at all. Of course, the team of humans already had a spare girl, in the form of Yattmur, who becomes Gren’s new girlfriend seemingly overnight. The two are accompanied by four tummy-belly men, who are short, hair, and cowardly by nature. Also dim-witted, not that Gren and Yattmur are all that intelligent. Arguably the only reason they’ve even made it this far is the help of the morel, a sentient and indeed highly intelligent fungus, on Gren’s head. The morel acts as like a second brain, although given the conflict it has with Gren the relationship they have is more like Eddie Brock and the symbiote. They will need all the help they can get, though, since humans are scarce, and for maybe the first time in history, plant life totally rules the world. There are also large carnivorous insects, but those don’t play much of a factor in “Timberline.” Instead, vegetable life has evolved to such a point as to replace practically all fauna on land.
It could be because Gren is the POV character (I hesitate to call him the “hero”), but the way Aldiss writes women in the Hothouse series really leaves something to be desired. Women are treated as disposable, and already we’ve seen multiple fridge-stuffings. This doesn’t even align with what would make sense in such a world: you’d think women would be treated as more valuable, in a world where mankind is endangered and has also become a prey animal, but no, their deaths are treated with as much (or rather with as little) gravity as when the men die. And that goes for the ones who don’t make it. As for Yattmur, she spends virtually all of “Timberline” sulking and complaining about Gren being mean to her, which is understandable on its own, but then she doesn’t do much of anything—not that Gren proves to be much better in that regard. Generally Aldiss’s view of humanity seems to be a dim one, which sometimes works, but sometimes it also results in some fatigued storytelling. It’s strange, and a bit funny, that the most active character in “Timberline” is a parasitic fungus.
The boat Our Heroes™ took at the end of the last story ends up crashing into an iceberg, but that’s okay, since all six survive and even make it onto an islet, in which there is enough food and shelter for the time being. Hell, there aren’t even any enemies here worth mentioning, so that for once Gren and Yattmur are able to have a good time. Maybe too good. The central conflict of this story is that the morel wants to keep moving, since it knows the team can’t stay here forever, while Gren is content to sit back and soak in the sun. This is all framed as serious, but it’s really not as serious as it sounds. The morel wants to progress the plot while Gren doesn’t. Both have valid arguments for their points of view, namely that yes, supplies will eventually run out on the islet, but also getting off the islet will be its own challenge, on account of the boat being wrecked. Meanwhile Gren becomes grumpier because of this, to the point where he becomes borderline abusive with Yattmur. The tummy-belly men are of no help whatsoever in all this; actually their so useless and whiny that it’s a wonder why Gren doesn’t just opt to murder them. Being both stupid and submissive, it’s not like the tummy-belly men would’ve resisted much on that front.
There is a somewhat humorous digression when Our Heroes™ uncover a (I’m not sure how else to put this) centuries-old robotic bird whose purpose seems to be to spew political slogans. That the bird is still in working order after all this time would strain one’s suspension of disbelief, if not for this being a world where Earth and its moon have become interlocked via a kind of plant-constructed elevator. And also there’s one half of the world where the sun always shines, while the other half lies in eternal darkness. Naturally Gren and the gang don’t even try to make sense of what the bird (which they name Beauty) is saying, since not only is there no such thing as “Monkey Labour” anymore, the physical land of India probably no longer exists. Politics, like human life in general, is transient. I said before that Aldiss strikes me as a pessimist, and the comic relief with Beauty is a case of that pessimism being used to inspire good writing. Beauty is an operational but now totally obsolete and worthless piece of machinery whose election-year ramblings are lost on the characters, who indeed would have nothing to gain from it even if they understood it.
There Be Spoilers Here
Their ticket off the islet turns out to be a species of bug-like vegetable called a “stalker,” a giant long-legged veggie that’s sort of like the tripods from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. It’s a nice image, but unfortunately this sequence of Gren and the others riding atop the stalkers goes on for half an eternity. Another good image that sadly gets drawn out is the moment they cross the “timberline,” i.e., the shadow-line separating the sunlit world from the land of night. Mind you that “Timberline” is about as long as “Hothouse,” so it’s a rather meaty novelette. For the first time in the series I feel like there’s some filler that could’ve been cut.
A Step Farther Out
Hopefully it will not take me another ten months to get to the final Hothouse story. Maybe eight. I do feel like returns on this series have been diminishing somewhat, but then maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if I was reading these stories in novel form. I have to assume the short passages of exposition at the beginning, which would strike the reader as obvious if they were to read these stories in quick succession, were removed for the novel. I remember James Blish got his panties in a twist over the world of Aldiss’s series being absurd, in that it’s really science-fantasy rather than properly SFnal, but the strange world of Hothouse is its selling point. Certainly the characters are not much to write home about, although the morel is a very fine creation. We’ll have to see how this all turns out.
(Cover by Philippe Halsman. The 28 June, 1952 issue of Collier’s, where Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” first appeared.)
When Robert Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” appeared in the 8 February, 1947 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, there was cause for celebration. Heinlein had just returned from a four-year hiatus, having spent much of that time helping with the war effort, and when he got back to writing it was as if he had never left. In the years immediately following the war, in which the US immerged as a superpower, there was a burgeoning suburban middle class, and therefore a burgeoning suburban middle-class readership. The Saturday Evening Post was, for much of its existence, a weekly tabloid-format magazine that had already been around for over a century; but by the immediate post-war years it had reached the absolute height of its popularity. By 1948 something like 10% of American adults were reading the Post, which was and still is a ridiculous circulation. The Post was a “slick” magazine, although it didn’t use slick paper; rather it was slick in the sense that it paid well for articles and stories, and the lucky author would enjoy a wide readership. It was a mainstream magazine that occasionally printed genre fiction. When several of Heinlein’s stories appeared in the Post in the late ’40s, corresponding with a book deal he had made with Scribner’s, he knew he had hit the big time.
Heinlein’s experience with gaining mainstream traction was not totally unique to him. There were some other writers of his generation, and even more of the following generation, who started out writing pulp fiction before moving to the slicks. Ray Bradbury, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Harlan Ellison, and even Stephen King had their first stories published in pulp magazines. King, in the introduction to his story collection Night Shift, thanks (among others) Robert W. Lowndes, who was editor of the cheap and now-forgotten magazines Magazine of Horror and Startling Mystery Stories. Lowndes had also bought King’s first two stories, when the latter was barely out of his teens. Evidently the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.
Science fiction has infested practically every facet of modern life, so it can be hard to appreciate the fact that it used to be quite a niche interest. We’re constantly being flooded with bestselling novels that are SF, and a disproportionate number of the highest grossing movies ever are SF. For better or worse (it’s easily for the worse) we’re at the mercy of technocrats who grew up reading SF. But going back to the 1940s and ’50s, SF was mostly constrained to magazines with ultimately low circulations, not to mention all the B-movies. Even before that, SF was steeped in the pulp tradition, which is to say being published in pulp magazines. While science fiction as a codified genre became a thing in 1926, with the launch of Amazing Stories, the pulps went back to the tail end of the 19th century, and some fiction from these older pulp magazines even found their way as reprints in Hugo Gernsback’s newfangled “scientifiction” magazine. The pulps started proliferating in the 1900s thanks to a few big publishers, maybe the most famous of them among old SF fans being Street & Smith, who would later print Astounding Stories. By the time Amazing Stories launched, you already had popular pulp magazines that sometimes printed science fiction and fantasy, including Argosy, Adventure, and Blue Book. Most famously there was Weird Tales, which while focused on horror and fantasy also regularly printed SF.
The “pulp” label is easy enough to understand, although it’s not totally consistent. As a rule of thumb, a pulp magazine in the early 20th century had such-and-such dimensions, but more importantly it had to do with the quality of the paper, which was rough and brittle. Sometimes the edges were untrimmed. These magazines were cheaper to buy than their slick counterparts, but correspondingly they also paid less by the word. Also, in terms of class politics and age demographics, it must be said that while the likes of The Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s Weekly appealed to bourgeois readers, adults who while part of the workforce weren’t exactly getting their hands dirty, the pulps appealed more to working-class adults and adolescents. Granted that it’s unwise to generalize a whole era of popular fiction like this, the stories in these magazines tended to be heavy on action and plotting, and with at least a tinge of wish fulfillment. As I said, these stories did not pay well on a word-by-word basis, but if one could crack the code of what a magazine’s editor is looking for, and how to write a reliably solid adventure story, there was some money in it. The luckiest of these pulpsters was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had taken on writing relatively late in life, already being deep in his thirties and with some odd jobs behind him. In 1912 alone Burroughs cracked the code with such gusto that he basically changed the face of American pulp fiction, with the one-two punch of A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, both appearing in the pulp magazine The All-Story (which later merged with Argosy, it’s confusing). Burrough’s literary reputation is up for contention, but the cultural impact he continues to have is hard to deny.
Most of the authors who appeared in these pulps are now totally forgotten, and in fact got tossed into the dust bin of history decades ago. At the same time, some of the most important American writers of the 20th century got their start writing for the pulps, be they SFF magazines or other genres. Black Mask, founded in 1920, was a crime-oriented pulp magazine that would publish works by such future giants of crime fiction as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The best of these authors eventually moved on from the pulps in favor of better-paying markets, such as getting into novel-writing, but the strictness of magazine protocol encouraged discipline over raw imagination. In the introduction for his collection Trouble Is My Business, Chandler recounts his experiences with writing stories for Black Mask and other pulps in the ’30s as follows:
If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.
Chandler describes a push-and-pull effect with writing for the pulps that’s by no means unique to crime fiction—in fact it applies to every other genre of magazine fiction, including what appears in the slicks. Editors have their biases, no matter how benign they appear, and there were restrictions regarding censorship in those days that made it so that the language could never be too salty or the sex appeal all that explicit. (The sexiest a fiction magazine could get was Weird Tales, which you have to admit had some pretty erotically charged covers in the ’30s, but even that came with some legal trouble. Pick a random issue of Weird Tales from the year 1935 and juxtapose it with a random issue from 1939 or 1940: you’ll see the difference.) These restrictions encouraged writers to develop formulae that could get their work accepted with more ease, depending on the market. The work itself might not be masterful, but these markets did serve as training grounds for promising writers.
The years between the world wars saw the height of the pulps, but America’s involvement in World War II demanded everyone tighten their figurative belts, including a need for paper. The paper shortage during the war saw the deaths of several pulp magazines, maybe the most lamented of them being Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy-oriented sister magazine. Astounding itself barely survived the paper shortage, being the only one of Street & Smith’s genre magazines to have made it. Even the ones that did survive, including Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, fell on hard times during and immediately after the war, with the former eventually closing its doors (not for the last time) in 1954. This is not to say good fiction wasn’t being published in these magazines, especially in the case of Weird Tales which continued strong more or less until the end, but these were struggling magazines with small (if also devoted) readerships. By the early ’50s the pulp format was on its way out, with former pulps switching over to digest. It didn’t help that there were newfangled magazines at this time, including Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which were printed in digest format from the beginning. These magazines were not quite slick, as they were still aimed at the small world of genre readers; but they had decent quality paper, they paid well enough, and they (namely F&SF) even sometimes reprinted material from the slicks.
(Cover by Clinton Pettee. The All-Story, October 1928. This issue ran Tarzan of the Apes in its entirety.)
Of course, pulp writing, along with the format associated with it, is dead, and in fact has been dead since before my parents were even born. Analog Science Fiction, formerly Astounding, is now the only genre magazine still standing which had begun its life as a pulp magazine. What little remains of the pulp years has long since found its way into book form, as novels, story collections, anthologies, what have you. The 1950s saw the extinction of the pulp magazine, with the last of these to have stuck with the format, Science Fiction Quarterly, ending with its February 1958 issue. The digest format, a sort of happy medium between the unsophisticated pulps and the decidedly bourgeois slicks, continued. Now, while the pulps were gone, they were by no means forgotten. If you love Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Tarzan, or a good film noir, just know that these things have their roots in the pulps. Hell, H. P. Lovecraft had much of his fiction published in Weird Tales, and indeed that lurid magazine was often the only market that would take his work. Given that the rates were poor, the paper was brittle, and the readership either very young or not too thoroughly educated, pulp fiction left quite a legacy. And within a couple decades there would be a book counterpart to the digest magazines—that is to say, popular fiction in book form that’s sort of pulpy but also sort of slick. There soon came a mode of writing that would embody the best (and worst) qualities of both its parents, and in part is has to do with paperbacks outselling magazines.
The market for genre magazines has evolved radically over the decades, so that the most successful ones running today are online, subsisting on either Patreon subscriptions or simply donations. There’s no debate, however, that the book, and more specifically the paperback, enjoys a far wider readership than any magazine you can name in [the current year]. Go to any bookstore, be it a Barnes & Noble or that indie place you frequent just around the corner, and you will find rows upon rows of paperbacks and hardcovers; meanwhile there may be a couple stalls for magazines, if any, and only a fraction of those will be magazines focusing on fiction. Now, it’s not exactly cheap to buy a paperback novel, unless you have a publisher’s line of paperbacks, like Oxford World’s Classics or Barnes & Noble Classics, that focus on printing “classic literature” at very reasonable prices. But most paperbacks will cost you something. My paperback copy of R. F. Kuang’s Babel (to use an example of a recent novel that a lot of people have read and liked) ran me $20, which feels almost as if Kuang herself (or rather her publisher in this case, HarperCollins) had beaten me over the head with a stick and called me ugly. Kuang is independently wealthy, even if she weren’t a popular writer; surely she (or rather HarperCollins) didn’t need my $20. Still, she writes for a broad audience, as in she writes popular fiction, and evidently she’s doing something right.
You know who else writes popular fiction? George R. R. Martin. One of our most famous living writers, regardless of genre. I’ve covered a few of his short works on this very site, and will do so again eventually. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is very popular, both in how many people read these books as well as the demographic Martin writes (or wrote) with in mind. But was that always the case? Did you know that the Daenarys chapters of A Game of Thrones first appeared as a novella in an issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, just a few months before A Game of Thrones found its way to bookstore shelves? If you were one of the relatively few people to have been subscribed to Asimov’s in 1996, you would’ve gotten a sneak peek at what has since become one of the most famous and controversial series in all of fantasy. Asimov’s is a digest magazine with, as I said, a healthy but ultimately modest readership. It’s not pulpy, but you also wouldn’t call it slick or popular. It’s sophisticated, but not that sophisticated. Martin himself has made no secret of being influenced by pulp fiction from the days of yore, namely SF published in Astounding before it became Analog. Indeed Martin’s biggest aspiration as a writer at the outset of his career was to get published in Analog, which he succeeded at. Nowadays people tend to overlook Martin’s pre-ASoIaF SFF, maybe because said fiction was not aimed at a general readership for the most part. I do suggest doing some digging and, for instance, reading the short fiction collected in Martin’s Dreamsongs.
Popular genre fiction takes the broad demographic and image of respectability from the slicks and combines that with the juvenile adventurousness of the pulps. The problem we’re now facing is that with the pulps long gone and the slick magazines not much more relevant, the options you have for reading some good SFF have narrowed. This is made worse by the phasing-out of the mass market paperback, which for a few decades served as like a book equivalent to a pulp magazine issue, in terms of paper quality, garishness, and affordability. The mass market paperback is smaller and cheaper than the trade paperback, but the latter has has finer and more flexible paper, not to mention an air of respectability. You can still find Martin’s old books as mass market paperbacks, but the same can’t be said for Kuang, or indeed other SFF authors of her age or even a generation older. Publishers used to get by on selling mass market paperbacks at $9 a pop, or magazine issues at the same price; but now they want your $20 for a trade paperback edition novel you might already have. Pulp and slick writing have merged, or maybe fallen together into a boiling pot, to create popular fiction, but this Frankenstein monster is itself a victim of capitalist greed. Clearly there’s a big audience for fancy trade paperbacks and even fancier hardcovers, but the problem (and I’m sort of paraphrasing Oscar Wilde here) is that audiences tend to be stupid.
(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1933.)
Who Goes There?
Robert E. Howard’s career lasted only about a dozen years, from 1924 until his death in 1936, but in that time he wrote several volumes’ worth of short fiction, poetry, and a few novels. He wrote for every pulp fiction of just about every sort (except, funnily enough, science fiction, whose market was burgeoning at the time), and for every magazine that would take him. He wrote Westerns, sports stories (he especially loved boxing), non-supernatural adventure fiction, horror, and of course, fantasy. Fantasy writing, prior to Howard, was pretty much invariably rooted in the British tradition, but Howard brought a distinctly American flavor which has been a subspecies of fantasy writing ever since. He is the father of sword-and-sorcery, although he wasn’t strictly the first practitioner, nor did he coin the term. But he created a few series characters who fell into fantasy of this sort, culminating in Conan the Cimmerian, the first great sword-and-sorcery hero. With Conan, his most popular creation, Howard’s legacy was secured; and a good thing too, considering Howard would take his own life at the age of just thirty. Most writers don’t even reach maturity in their craft by that age, and some don’t even start writing until later; so it’s impressive that Howard had said all that he more or less wanted to say by that time, although he had shown interest in shifting away from fantasy and focusing more on writing Westerns. Sadly, the world will never know.
Something I didn’t bring up in my recent editorial on Howard is how his Irish heritage informed his writing, there being no clearer an example of this than with Conan himself. Contrary to what Arnie has made us think, Conan, as written by Howard, is very much a Celtic warrior, rather than Germanic. Howard’s Irish background also plays a big role in today’s story, the standalone horror year “The Cairn on the Headland,” which takes place in none other than Dublin, Ireland. The setting, as well as its use of Irish and Nordic mythology, makes for some of Howard’s most overtly Irish writing. It’s also a fun time, so there’s that.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1933 issue of Strange Tales. As was typical, it wasn’t ever reprinted in Howard’s lifetime, only first reappearing in the 1946 collection Skull-Face and Others. It has also appeared in The Macabre Reader (ed. Donald A. Wollheim), Rivals of Weird Tales (ed. Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg), and the Howard collections Wolfshead and The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard.
Enhancing Image
This is a tad embarrassing, but although you get what the word means just from context in the story, I did feel the need to look up the definition of “cairn” at one point. It’s not a word you see used casually, at least in modern times, and neither is “headland.”
The story itself takes place sometime in the early 20th century, in what would’ve been the Irish Free State. James O’Brien (possibly a shoutout to Irish author Fitz-James O’Brien) is our protagonist and narrator, an Irish American who has come to the land of his ancestors, and unfortunately for him he didn’t come alone. Ortali is a gaping asshole, and is here because O’Brien can’t get rid of him. I’m not joking. In a series of events that maybe shouldn’t be taken at face value, O’Brien got into a feud with a professor, and went to his abode one night with the intent of just threatening the older man. However, the professor had drawn a knife, and in a freak accident fell on it, stabbed right through the heart. This sounds unlikely. Regardless of whether O’Brien is being an unreliable narrator in recounting this story, Ortali, being an assistant to the professor, had witnessed O’Brien just after the fact, and even if O’Brien didn’t commit murder it would be hard to prove otherwise in court. Ortali, being a totally reasonable man, decided to blackmail O’Brien, and the two have been conjoined at the hip ever since. As O’Brien says, “If hate could kill, [Ortali] would have dropped dead.” If only there was a way to be rid of him.
Calling O’Brien a hero would be terribly generous, not because he has thoughts of murdering Ortali for much of the story, but in fairness Ortali (at least from O’Brien’s perspective) is shown to be worse. Scheming, selfish, condescending, and maybe worst of all, disrespectful toward Irish history. He writes off O’Brien’s interest in Irish mythology as silly superstition, but you can guess who gets the last laugh there. O’Brien spends a good portion of the story’s opening stretch explaining the lore behind Grimmin’s Cairn, a monument on the outskirts of Dublin which serves as a sign of the fallen, in the last battle between the Celts and the Vikings. In 1014 CE, King Brian and his troops drove off the Vikings for the last time, making sure the Vikings didn’t take Ireland. Literally it was a battle between an indigenous people and an imperial force, but it was religiously a decisive blow, between “the White Christ” and Nordic paganism. Nowadays certain white supremacists and fascists cling to the Nordic pantheon symbolically, but Christianity was here to stay. The strange thing about the cairn, O’Brien claims, is that it surely was not made to commemorate the soldiers fallen in battle, being a single mound and, as he says, “too symmetrically built.” It was made for something (or someone) else.
Something I really dislike about the magazine version of “The Cairn on the Headland” is that the both the illustrations and introductory quotation give away all the major spoilers, so that frankly it’s hard to be surprised by the story’s climax. There’s a strange old woman by the name of Meve MacDonnal whom O’Brien meets, their meeting itself being a bit uncanny, because Meve’s accent is a strange one. If you’ve read this in Strange Tales you could already infer, however, that Meve is a ghost, having been dead some three centuries, a reveal that’s not made in-story until later. Still, the two bond over their shared heritage, with Meve even saying O’Brien was her maiden name. Meve also gives O’Brien a special cross, a relic he assumed to be kept away somewhere, in secret. Only one of it’s kind in the world. She says he’ll be needing it. What a nice lady, never mind the whole being-dead part. Of course it’s only later that O’Brien finds Meve’s grave and understands that either he’s nuttier than squirrel shit (a possibility) or he’s dealing with the supernatural.
Whilst ostensibly a spooky story, “The Cairn on the Headland” is less effective as horror than as a classic ghost story in an exotic locale. There’s an undercurrent of tragedy, given that despite it being his ancestral homeland, Howard never lived to visit Ireland. Lacking first-hand experience of the landscape, he resorted to the imagination, of which this story is very much a byproduct. Dublin here is not the Dublin of James Joyce, but a dreamland, where a plot epiphany quite literally comes to O’Brien in a dream, and which he decides to take at face value. Even in the real world we have this funny habit of reading our dreams as sometimes being premonitions, or warnings, so O’Brien’s behavior, while a bit contrived, is not that unusual. It also helps O’Brien is narrating, from his somewhat deranged point of view, so that it’s easier to buy into the weird shit.
There Be Spoilers Here
In this kind of story it’s customary to have a character who fucks around and finds out, which in this case is not O’Brien, but the even more unlikable Ortali. Thanks to a prophetic dream and some knowledge of Nordic mythology, O’Brien concludes that the cairn is not a monument to any Irish or Nordic soldier, but to Odin himself. The one-eyed. The Gray Man. Grimmin’s Cairn turns out to be a bastardization of Gray Man’s Cairn, after centuries of neglect, a fallen god stuck in a land where nobody believes in him. The Norse gods may be gone, but they’re by no means dead. The problem is that, as tend to be the case with the heads of pantheons, Odin is a major-league asshole—a lesson Ortali learns too late, after having torn the cairn asunder in the dead of night.
It’s maybe convenient for O’Brien, already a fugitive for one unlikely death, that the awakened and grumpy Odin smites Ortali with lightning. I mean what’re the odds of such a thing happening, right? Even more conveniently for O’Brien, the ghost lady had given him that cross, and for some reason, like a vampire, Odin is allergic to crosses. I know the reason, of course, it has to do with Norse religion having been overrun and finally replaced by Christianity. This is funny coming from Howard, who was not really a religious person at all, but I get it has more to do with Christianity’s (more specifically Catholicism’s) centuries-long shared history with Ireland than with a belief in “the White Christ.”
A Step Farther Out
Howard was not the most original of horror writers; like a lot of us he learned his craft by way of mimicry. “The Cairn on the Headland” is not a very original story, in that even if you didn’t have the ending spoiled for you in advance you can easily anticipate the outcome. It has a certain vibe about it, though, like a good-but-not-great M. R. James story. The atmosphere is the key to enjoying it.
(Robert E. Howard in 1936. One of the last photos taken of him.)
(As you can guess, this post has to do with mental illness and suicide. My main source for this is Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard, which even with its faults in mind [namely some sloppy editing] is a reliable summary of Howard”s life.)
I consider myself something of a Robert E. Howard fan, and yet I’ve not even come close to reading all of his work. Given that he committed suicide at just thirty years old, Howard had written an intimidatingly large amount over a career that only spanned about a dozen years, between a few novels, dozens of short stories and novellas, and quite a bit of poetry. He was born on January 22, 1906, 120 years ago, and died on June 11, 1936. He was a Texan born and raised; yet despite adhering to the rough-and-tumble ways of his state to an extent, he knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer. While he had an intellectual curiosity, Howard also knew from an early age that he wanted to write pulp fiction, rather than “real” literature. This was during the age of the original pulp magazines, called so because they were printed on cheap paper, sometimes with untrimmed edges. The world of pulp fiction in the 1920s and ’30s was pretty broad, believe it or not, ranging from general adventure fiction to Westerns, detective fiction, science fiction, sports stories, and fantasy. When he was in his teens, Howard tried desperately to write pulp of professional quality, aiming to be published in Adventure, one of the biggest pulp magazines of the time. But he never appeared in Adventure. Instead his first professional sale went to the newfangled Weird Tales in 1924, where Howard would stay as a regular (on top of selling to other magazines) until his death. Just twelve years as a professional, but it was enough.
Howard’s early death and the circumstances of his suicide have haunted the world of fantasy for nearly a century—a haunting made more eerie because for decades we didn’t have much more than hearsay as to what the man himself was like. Howard never lived to give any interviews, and while we now have a number of letters, his character and reputation rested on the words of those who knew him, and in some cases, those who didn’t. Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard, by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine de Camp, and Jane Whittington Griffin, was the first book-length biography of Howard, and it was only published in 1983. L. Sprague de Camp had already written on Howard and was, along with Lin Carter, responsible for public perception of Howard’s work (for both good and ill) starting in the ’50s. De Camp didn’t know Howard personally; they would’ve been contemporaries, had Howard not died when he did. There wouldn’t be another book-length biography of Howard until the 2000s, hence Mark Finn’s book. There is, of course, a saying attributed to Oscar Wilde that there is no such thing as history, only biography. Another way of looking at it is that there’s no such thing as history, only the interpretation of history. There are some basic facts, but what to do with these facts, not to mention the messy details (or, as happens more often than not, the lack of details), is really up to the biographer. Howard’s fate, on top of being tragic no matter how you look at it, has presented a problem for those wanting to know about him for decades, and (to paraphrase William S. Burroughs) there’s no secret Howard himself can tell us.
What’s the story everyone knows? Hester, Howard’s mother, was ill for many years, and in June 1936 she slipped into a coma from which she would never awaken. Howard and his father Isaac knew that this was it. Howard didn’t exactly have an easy relationship with Isaac, what with their arguments and Isaac holding Howard’s choice of profession against him, but his relationship with Hester has long been the subject of controversy. It doesn’t help that like Socrates and Jesus of Narzareth, we don’t really have anything from Hester’s own perspective on the matter—only how others viewed her. While Finn tries to be even-handed in his assessment of Howard as a person (Finn clearly being a fan of Howard’s work), his assessment of Hester is decidedly unflattering. Finn frames Hester as being chronically manipulative, lying to her son on a regular basis throughout his life, as well as trying to push him away from Novalyne Price, the only woman Howard ever loved romantically. (Howard’s relationship with Novalyne is its own can of worms, so we’ll get to that later.)
There are several famous authors who were momma’s boys to varying degrees of unhealthiness, from Marcel Proust to D. H. Lawrence, with Howard being among them. This much is not up for debate. It’s also quite unambiguous, because he admitted as such to more than one person, that Howard planned to not outlive Hester. For her part, Hester’s days were always numbered, a fact she seemingly used as a manipulation tactic. That Howard actually went through with his plan came as a shock to his friends and Novalyne, since even the few who did know about such a plan didn’t believe it was something Howard was that serious about.
Still.
On June 11, the day after he drank coffee for the first (and last) time in his life, Howard went out to his car, pulled out a .380 revolver he had borrowed, and shot himself through the temple. Isaac and others heard the shot and brought Howard into the house, and rather miraculously he lived for another eight hours before dying.
Hester died the next day. Within a span of 24 hours, Isaac witnessed the deaths of both his wife and his son.
Robert E. Howard never married, and he didn’t leave behind any heirs. He did write up a will weeks before his death, which I don’t think is something the average 30-year-old does. The thing about Howard is that, as often (but not always) happens with suicides, he deliberated on ending his life for quite some time before the end. There are about as many reasons for why someone might commit suicide as there are stars in the sky, which I’ve noticed is something people who’ve never grappled with depression or suicidal ideation struggle to understand.
Finn interprets Howard’s suicide as perhaps an inevitability, a foregone conclusion neither Howard nor anyone close to him was equipped to prevent. This might well be true. It’s tempting, especially given how young the man was, to imagine an alternate timeline wherein Howard was able to live even ten or twenty more years—the problem being that there’s no clear path for this alternate ending. There is no simple or singular “if only” scenario in which Howard could’ve spared himself. Some suicides are preventable, but others, even with the gift of hindsight, are not so straightforward. As I said before, a lot of suicides (especially, it must be said, the famous cases) plan their own deaths well in advance, either with utmost secrecy or hidden in plain sight. When Kurt Cobain killed himself, it was in fact not the first time he had attempted suicide, and those close to him knew just how volatile his mental state had been. Ian Curtis of the band Joy Division wrote tracks for the band’s final album which amounted to death poems, with said album releasing after Curtis’s suicide. Ernest Hemingway admitted to his wife, many years before his death, that he would probably commit suicide like his father did.
So it was.
Let’s rewind the film a bit, and by “a bit” I mean a few years. Howard and Novalyne had met in 1933, through a mutual friend, with Novalyne knowing Howard by reputation prior to having met him. She knew Howard as a writer and an eccentric, who while having various pen pals was more standoffish with local people. The good news was that Novalyne was bookish herself, and she had enough willpower to not only hit up Howard, but to get past his conniving mother. The two started dating in 1934, and their relationship lasted about a year, with its ups and downs. The tragedy of their romance was twofold, in that Howard’s neurosis worked to sabotage it, but also that even if they had stayed together, it’s unlikely that Novalyne could’ve prevented Howard’s suicide.
This is not to say nothing good came of their relationship; on the contrary, Novayline inspired some of Howard’s strongest material when it came to writing women. As Finn puts it:
It’s easy to see how Robert could have been attracted to Novalyne. Certainly, she was prettyand intelligent, but her spirit was vital and alive, and not unlike some of Robert’s stronger female characters. Just prior to their first meeting in 1933, Robert sold ‘The Shadow of the Vulture’ in late March, a story that was written in late 1932. It’s tempting to insinuate that Red Sonya was inspired by Novalyne, but it’s more probable that if any character was a response to Robert’s new, outspoken girlfriend, that character was Agnes de Chastillon, the Sword Woman.
Another clear example of Novalyne’s influence was Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, Conan’s strong-willed companion in the novella Red Nails. There’s also the pirate queen Bêlit, in “Queen of the Black Coast,” one of the most beloved Conan stories, who takes on the burly Cimmerian as her lover. It is indeed the one time Conan falls genuinely in love throughout the series, at least as written by Howard.
Conan the Cimmerian is one of the most famous characters in fantasy, and one of the few characters in literature to emerge from the 20th century and garner a permanent legacy. Everybody “knows” who Conan is, even if it’s more often through movies and artwork than through Howard’s writing. You could Conan as a pop culture figure is a mixed child birthed from Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In just four years Howard wrote more than a dozen Conan stories, including a full novel, and that’s not even taking into account the stories published after Howard’s death. Howard had started several series character, including the undead-fighting Puritan Solomon Kane and the proto-Conan figure Bran Mak Morn; but Conan was Howard’s ultimate hero, and soon came to be easily his most popular character ever.
The success of Conan also came to be a thorn in Howard’s side, though, in that he at times grew tired of the character, a fatigue he admitted in letters to friends. Even if we didn’t have those letters, however, it’d be easy enough to infer that sometimes Howard went to Conan simply for the paycheck, since some Conan stories are easily worse than others. I don’t see anyone claim “The Pool of the Black One” or “The Devil in Iron” as their favorite Conan story. The lesser Conan stories are formulaic and not very exciting, frankly. Howard’s growing weariness with his star hero also correlated with the series becoming progressively grimmer, bordering on outright nihilistic. While awesome violence was always a part of the series, and indeed Howard’s fiction more often than not, the tone of latter-day Conan stories was more pessimistic than earlier entries. By the time we get to Beyond the Black River, serialized in 1935, we have one of the most downbeat endings to any pulp story published at the time.
It maybe shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Howard decided to lay Conan to rest as early as 1935. Red Nails was the final Conan story Howard wrote, and its serialization in Weird Tales happened around the same time as Howard’s death. It’s possible that had Howard lived long enough he might’ve eventually returned to Conan, like Arthur Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes, but the truth is that Howard had become disillusioned with the character who had brought him the most attention. He had become interested in writing Westerns, and he might’ve been the first author to have consciously mixed the Western with weird fiction, most notably with the 1932 story “The Horror from the Mound.” This, along with the rare non-supernatural fiction he wrote, spoke more directly of the landscape he knew: that of Texas in the early 20th century.
It’s hard to say what Howard would’ve written had he lived longer, but he seemed convinced, by the end of it, that he could not write anymore. In the last months of his life, after he and Novalyne had broken up, he had made up his mind to kill himself. Novelyne, who had not heard from Howard for some time, had gotten word of his death on June 15, four days after the fact. She had witnessed his declining mental health, including the uncharacteristic growing of a mustache which didn’t suit him, but didn’t act. She recalled things Howard said to no one in particular, repeatedly, like lines in a poem. As Finn writes: “Robert frequently talked of being in his ‘sere and yellow leaf,’ and the phrase always stuck in Novalyne’s craw, for she could never remember where she’d heard it before.” She did some digging and found the line to be from the final act of Macbeth.
The full line is as follows:
I have liv’d long enough: my way of life Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf; And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but, in their stead, Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.
When it comes to bystanders in the wake of a suicide, there tends to be the creeping feeling that a) something could’ve been done, and b) there were warning signs. Howard didn’t exactly try to keep his plan to commit suicide a seqret, and yet nobody close to him was prepared to take extreme measures. I’m not sure if I agree with Finn’s opinion that nothing could’ve been done to avert Howard’s suicide, that his death was inevitable and unpreventable, if still tragic. It’s certainly tragic in that we see someone who was quite talented, and who in his own way had a strong personality; yet this very personality, with such a dim outlook on life, seemed to have doomed him. At the end of his relationsip with Novalyne, Howard lamented that he sometimes wanted to and yet could not be a “normal” man. He couldn’t smoke cigarettes with the lads by the railroad tracks or go to church on Sundays, or work a normal job. If he did those things he would perhaps no longer be Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan and Solomon Kane. He hated the idea of working a normal job, he was ambivalent about Christianity, and he was maybe too devoted to his mother.
For better or worse, only someone like Howard, that man who spent his final days profoundly unhappy, probably believing himself to be a failure, could’ve forever changed fantasy writing the way he did. Which might be the ultimate tragedy of the whole thing.
(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, February 1927.)
Since it’s now the new year for everyone, it’s only natural that we have some new things to look forward to or new things to do. I have a few New Year’s resolutions myself: some movies on my watchlist, quite a few video games I hope to get around to playing. I have hundreds of games in my backlog and even more books to be read in my personal library. I have multiple hobbies, which is something I would recommend to everyone. Unfortunately another thing on my to-do list for 2026 is to either get a second job or to try my hand at writing professionally, which would take time away from this hobbies, including this here blog.
Truth be told, I’ve been winding down productivity here for a minute, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’m seemingly incapable of uploading posts “on time” (but of course who’s keeping time except for myself), and I’ve been missing one or even two reviews every month for the past several months. I wouldn’t be too worried, for the few of you who read this, since I’m not gonna be shutting down this site—just lowering my productivity. Granted, for the first couple years I ran this site I was writing at a feverish pace; in hindsight I’ve not really sure how I did that while also having a day job. In 2023 and 2024 I wrote over 200,000 words a year, according to the stats, which is a lot for one person. There was less wordage for 2025, and now for 2026 you can expect fewer posts as well. But this is like being on a flight and going from 20,000 feet to 10,000 feet.
Now, as you may know, Amazing Stories turns 100 this year. It was revived (again) not too long ago as basically a fanzine, but I would like to celebrate Amazing Stories as a professional magazine, which still means going through material that spans seven decades or so. It’s a lot, not helped by the fact that it has a pretty messy history as far as changes in editorship and publisher go. Except for maybe the beginning of its life it always played second fiddle to competing magazines, but it survived (sometimes even thrived) for an impressive stretch of time, given the circumstances. So, every month (except for March, July, and October, where you can expect short-story marathons) I’ll be covering a serial, novella, or short story from the pages of Amazing Stories. This should be interesting.
With the exception of the aforementioned months we’ll be doing only one serial, one novella, and one short story every month from now on, plus at least one editorial. Anyway, we have one story from the 1900s, one from the 1930s, and one from the 1950s.
For the serial:
The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells. Serialized in Amazing Stories, December 1926 to February 1927. First published in 1901. Feel like it would be criminal to pay tribute to Amazing Stories without bringing up Wells at least once, possibly even twice, since he was heavily associated with the magazine in its first few years. Wells himself is arguably the most important SF writer to have ever lived, with his influence being felt to this day practically everywhere you look. Any given SFnal premise likely has its roots in something Wells did over a century ago. This is even more impressive when you consider that Wells at the height of his powers lasted only half a dozen years or so. The First Men in the Moon is one of the last of his classic novels.
For the novella:
“The Gulf Between” by Tom Godwin. From the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Godwin became somewhat famous in SF circles for exactly one story, “The Cold Equations,” which he wrote pretty much in collaboration in John W. Campbell. It might surprise some people that Godwin had in fact written other stuff, and I admit I’m part of the problem because I don’t think I’ve read any Godwin aside from “The Cold Equations.” But I’m gonna fix that. “The Gulf Between” was Godwin’s first story, and it’s notable, if for no other reason than that the cover it inspired would later be reworked as the iconic cover for a certain Queen album.
For the short story:
“The Cairn on the Headland” by Robert E. Howard. From the January 1933 issue of Strange Tales. Over the course of about a dozen years, Howard wrote nonstop for every outlet that would accept his work, and he was not just a fantasy writer, also writing horror, Westerns, sports stories, and non-supernatural adventure pulp. He wrote everything except for SF, which he didn’t seem to have an interest in. Conan the Cimmerian occupied much of Howard’s later years, to the point where he began to resent his creation, but this didn’t stop him from doing standalone yarns like this one.
(Cover by Richard and Wendy Peni. Galaxy, October 1975.)
The Story So Far
Allen Carpentier has died, which turns out to be only the beginning of his suffering. He’s in Hell now, or Infernoland as he calls it, at first stuck in a little bottle like he were a genie before being released by a fat balding guy named Benito. Benito what? You’ll see. Now, Benito has been in Hell for a long time, and seems to know a way to get out. To where? Who’s to say. He’s to act as the Virgil to Allen’s Dante, and after all, Infernoland does seem to be modeled after Dante Alighieri’s vision of Hell. Funnily enough, the only way to get out of Hell and possibly into Heaven (or at least purgatory) is to go down, through each circle, each being stranger and more torturous than the last. For a while Allen has a hard time believe he’s in the real Hell and not some simulacrum; after all, he’s an SF writer and a rational man, not one given to superstition. But if Infernoland is a prank, or some sado-masochistic theme park, it’s extremely elaborate. “The Builders” have put a lot of work into it. Of course, it’d probably be easier just to take the whole setting as supernatural than to try some mental gymnastics, but that’s where some of the humor comes in—this being kind of a dark comedy. People have gone to Hell for all kind of reasons, not all of them seemingly reasonable. Niven and Pournelle get a lot of mileage out of depicting kinds of people they don’t like (mostly, but not always, people with left-wing bents) suffering in Hell, although the suffering itself is not always so bad either. There are a few times where they get more specific about whom they’ve thrown into Hell, although not too specific if the person was still alive in 1975. There’s a pretty memorable scene where Kurt Vonnegut (not named, but it’s very clearly meant to be him) is locked up in a big tomb, much to Allen’s annoyance.
Of course, it isn’t just Allen and Benito stuck together on this voyage, since their party does grow some, if also only temporarily. In an episode where the gang builds a glider, they get the help of Corbett, who was a pilot in life, and later they also recruit Billy the Kid—or at least a guy who claims to be Billy the Kid. Eventually they lose Corbett when he loses his nerve and decides to trudge his way back up to one of the higher circles. The thing is that nobody can die in Hell, on account of already being dead, and even though you may suffer incredibly gruesome torment that would have killed a normal person, you’ll not only live but heal in record time. So, this must be the real deal, then. Not helping is that aside from people populating Hell there are also black-skinned demons, a beast with an impossibly long tail named Midos, and a fishman named Geryon. Allen can barely bring himself to trust Benito as well, since the man knows a bit too much and acts more than a little off, like Allen is supposed to know who he is—or, more specificially, like Benito is some infamous figure from history.
Enhancing Image
We’re in the last stretch of Inferno, and it’s actually the shortest, which makes me think there’s more in the book version than what made it into the serial. I’m starting to think that yeah, there had to be some stuff cut out, because this feels stripped down within an inch of its life. Overall it feels more like the skeleton of a novel than the full picture, but I do have to say I like the bones on this thing enough. Then again, I’m not sure how much you can add to it and I’m even less sure why Niven and Pournelle felt compelled to return to it a few decades later. Something genre writers, both old and young, should learn is that more often than not, you should leave a good story well enough alone. Quit while you’re ahead.
It doesn’t take much time at all for Billy the Kid to quite literally get carried out of the novel, which in a world where nobody can die if I guess one way to do it. Just yoink a character out and put them in a location that’s virtually unreachable, it’s kinda like killing them off but not exactly. The party disintegrates rather quickly thereafter, since some World War II guys are all too happy (by that I mean outraged) to tell Allen he’s been traveling with Benito Mussolini this whole time. Yes, that Benito Mussolini. It really isn’t a shocker at all if you’ve been reading along and have not been living under a rock since the time of the pharaohs. I do genuinely have to wonder if the authors intended this to be a big reveal or if it’s meant to be like a joke, because I found it straining on my suspension of disbelief that Allen never figured it out for himself when it should’ve taken him maybe a few minutes. Also it sure is convenient that every historical figure we’d met up to this point where not know who Mussolini is, although that doesn’t go to explain why nobody who lived in a post-WWII world pointed out (or at least more strongly than merely hinted) that Benito looks and sounds familiar. It’s a contrived twist while also being laid on pretty thick, although maybe it was not so thick for readers in 1975. The reveal now feels demeaningly obvious, but given what Americans were allowed to learn in high schools in the days before the internet it’s possible that Mussolini was a semi-obscure figure for those not much interested in politics.
Well, anyway, Allen does what any reasonable person who’s confronted with the so-called father fascism: he chucks him into a goddamn fiery pit. Benito doesn’t even resist Allen turning on him, as if he expected and maybe even wanted this to happen. Of course, nobody can die here, which includes Benito, and you bet we’ll be seeing him again before the end. I do think the decision to make Benito Mussolini a pretty flawed but ultimately heroic character is certainly a choice. The former dictator, who was an avowed atheist in life, seems to have caught a second wind of Catholicism in Hell, and it seems to be an earnest religious awakening. The idea is that if Hell is meant to be punishment, then someone can choose to either better themself admist the horror or wallow in their sins until the end of time, and Benito has chosen the former. Niven and Pournelle are clearly trying to make an example of Benito, as to the potential of Hell’s cleansing flames, although they don’t go so far as to, say, rehabilitate Hitler or Stalin, who are mentioned but (for better or worse) never seen in-story. If Inferno were published as a new novel today it would probably cause a minor stir on social media and in SF fandom, what with how it handles real-life people; but in 1975, if it stirred any controversy then I’ve yet to find evidence of such a thing happening. I have to admit I like the audaciousness of such a move, even if it’s wrongheaded (and it probably is).
Eventually Allen and Benito do reunite, and despite having a good reason to wanna have a go at Allen’s neck, Benito’s pretty understanding about the whole thing. If for much of the novel we were stuck with Benito in the throws of religious mania, then this last stretch sees him having sunk into a depression. Speaking of religious mania, I mentioned that Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few then-living people featured in Hell. For those who think what the authors did with Vonnegut was really petty, just be aware that L. Ron Hubbard gets treated so much worse that it’s almost incomparable. As we reach the final circle of Hell and are about to meet Lucifer himself, Hubbard (again, not named, but context clues make it obvious) makes a cameo as a strange and disfigured monster which shambles around. For some reason Niven and Pournelle have a real bone to pick with people who create “false” religions, or who found religions chiefly for the purpose of making money off of gullible would-be followers.
The ending of Inferno is a bit of an anticlimax, although this seems to be by design, after the increasingly horrific bodily harm Allen has gone through. The iced-over lake, the final area, is relatively easy to traverse, and Lucifer, in the brief time he appears, seems like a chill guy. He only has a couple lines, but he does hit Allen with an epiphany about the purpose of Hell. There’s been a running debate among Christians for centuries as to the purpose of Hell, whether punishment in Hell is eternal or temporary, and so on. The authors here reach a compromise of sorts: Hell is eternal if you choose to stay there. Most of the people stuck in Hell are there either because they refuse to admit to their sins or because they see their punishment as appropriate. There have been at least a handful of people who’ve been escorted out of Hell thanks to Benito, so God knows how many others must have voyaged out over the eons. Benito has chosen to stay in Hell up to now because, well, he’s Benito Mussolini. (I think it needs be mentioned that Niven and Pournelle, while arguing that of course fascism is bad, also downplay just how instrumental a role Mussolini played in the world political climate unto the present day.) Allen convinces Benito that his time in Hell is finally up and that he can go on without him, for ironically, given that his goal this whole time has been to escape Hell, Allen chooses ultimately to stay. The ending is really abrupt, to the point where I’m convinced there’s more to it in the book version, but there’s a passing of the torch between Allen and Benito, the former taking the latter’s place.
A Step Farther Out
I remember years ago trying to read The Mote in God’s Eye, which is supposed to be the best of the Niven-Pournelle collaborations, and even after a couple false starts I couldn’t through it much. Mind you this was years ago, I’ve changed quite a bit as a reader, but I remember it being a rather stuffy and conservative (in a bad way) novel. I did not have such an issue with Inferno, although even in its book form it’s still less than half the length of The Mote in God’s Eye. Cut out the language and the most violent of the gore and you have something that could’ve appeared in Unknown a few decades earlier, since Inferno is essentially a fantasy novel, but with an evident SFnal bent to it that gives one the impression that its authors (or at least one of them, since Niven has occasionally written fantasy) are more accustomed to writing science fiction. It’s a detour for both its authors that more or less works, assuming you’re not too bothered by the humor and the fact that Inferno almost reads like fanfiction.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 