(It seems that my review schedule for the rest of November will be a big case of “when it’s done.” I’ve had my best friend and one of my partners come visit me, both from out of state, for a few days each. Turns out it’s very hard to get work done when you’re with someone you love.)
Elizabeth Hand was born in 1957 in New York, and has been active in the field since the ’80s. She’s been a regular contributor to F&SF as fiction author and reviewer for the past 35 years. Her most recent novel, A Haunting on the Hill, is a sequel to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House—only not quite. “Last Summer at Mars Hill” may give the impression, going by its title, that it’s planetary SF, but it’s really a different kind of story altogether, being arguably fantasy and set on a then-present-day Earth. According to the introductory blurb in F&SF, Hand wrote this story as a change of pace, “a heartwarmer written to keep her good karma.” The tactic worked, as it would win the Nebula and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. I don’t like it quite as much as other people did, at least at the time, but while it’s a bit overly sentimental for my taste it’s also a curious time capsule of semi-rural American life in the decade following HIV/AIDS being made public knowledge, one in which Hand plays fast and loose with genre boundaries. This was a story I had been meaning to knock off my list for a while. and I can’t say I was too disappointed.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Nebula Awards 31 (ed. Pamela Sargent), The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology (ed. Edward L. Ferman and Gordon Van Gelder), and the Hand collections Last Summer at Mars Hill and The Best of Elizabeth Hand.
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Moony and her boyfriend Jason are high school sweethearts who have returned to Mars Hill, a spiritualist commune founded in 1883 in Maine (that state where seemingly a lot of weird supernatural shit is prone to happen), and where both their parents live. Moony only has her mom while Jason has his dad, the latter having in the past come out as gay and who’s been living with HIV. “Two years before Jason’s father had tested HIV positive. Martin’s lover, John, had died that spring.” Ariel, Moony’s mom, is also revealed to have stage-four breast cancer, and she had not only hesitated to tell her daughter about this but had delayed in getting it treated, such that now the case looks to be terminal. So both their parents are dying. Mars Hill itself is all but the corpse of a once-thriving community; there are only two year-round residents in the commune, one being the enigmatic Mrs. Grose, a very old woman who was also a medium back in her youth, being one of the many “casualties” from Harry Houdini’s search for a genuine medium. Of course, Moony realizes that, the story taking place in the ’90s, “If it really had happened, it would make Mrs. Grose about ninety or a hundred years old. And she didn’t look a day over sixty.” And then there’s the mystery of “Them,” or the Light Children, mythical beings who lurk in Mars Hill’s environs and who were the reason the place was settled all those decades ago, though they’re more talked about than seen.
“Last Summer at Mars Hill” has a double meaning in its title, one in referring to something that happened in the past, as in last summer, and also perhaps Moony’s last summer visiting Mars Hill, the place of her upbringing and the double-edged sword that has clearly influenced her life up to this point, for good and ill. “Moony” is a nickname Jason calls her, and her “regular” name is Maggie, although her actual birth name is the rather embarrassing hippy-dippy Shadowmoon Starlight Rising. Naturally she doesn’t like to be known by that name. Moony descends from a line of proto-hippies, but she now lives in the era of flannel, of grunge music and professional skateboarding (a character wears a Pearl Jam shirt at one point), and she wants to live something close to a normal life. This is a story partly about time, but it’s also very of its time, both regarding the time it’s set in and the implicit attitude of how Hand tells her story. From what I can tell Hand is a straight woman, which seems to have influenced how she wrote Moony and Jason, who are both presumably straight, although Jason’s dad is openly gay. HIV/AIDS very much casts a shadow over the story, so it makes sense that there would be at least one explicitly queer character; but at the same time I couldn’t shake the feeling that Hand was writing about what was then a devastating epidemic from an outsider’s perspective, albeit sympathetically. Of course, there are far worse positions to take than being a cishet ally, especially since Hand wrote this story in the early ’90s. There were quite a few SF stories inspired by the AIDS epidemic in the late ’80s into the ’90s, mostly by authors who were not directly impacted by said epidemic. (Nancy Kress’s “Inertia” is a very good example of this, both as a story and as a commentary on the public reaction to AIDS and those hurt most by it.)
I suppose a quibble I have here is that while Moony’s POV is by no means invalid, I would rather read from the viewpoint of Jason, or especially Martin, since he’s a queer character who is dealing directly with impending doom. You could say it would make more sense to tell this story from Ariel’s POV since this story is more concerned with her terminal illness, but the basis of the conflict is that we’re not sure why Ariel did what she did—why she didn’t tell Moony sooner or why she waited this long to seek treatment. The history of Mars Hill is itself another point of conflict as much of it remains mysterious for Moony, a 16-year-old who has memories of the place but who clearly feels disconnected from the adults who stay there, not to mention her boyfriend feels the same way. There’s definitely a generation gap at work—in fact more than one, between Moony and Ariel, the latter being in her forties; and then there’s Mrs. Grose, who may be in her sixties or may be close to a hundred. To a degree I understand why Hand wrote from the perspectives she did, since the focus characters are all women (Moony, Ariel, and Mrs. Grose), while Jason and Martin, while important, are also men and thus relegated to supporting roles. This is a story about dealing with grief and impending loos, but it’s also a story about women of very different ages, in a place that seems to be out of step with the times. You may of course be wondering if “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is SF or fantasy, which is the story’s mystery on a metafictional level and which Hand deliberately refrains from answering clearly.
There Be Spoilers Here
The passage of time is sort of ambiguous, but Moony and Ariel have been at Mars Hill long enough that eventually the latter does get miraculously get a visit from the Light Children. Moony, not knowing what the hell the Light Children are capable of, is understandably spooked when Ariel leaves a note one day, fearing her mother might commit suicide or get into trouble; but instead she finds that her mother’s been healed. Her cancer is in recession, despite that being a medical impossibility. And if Martin still has HIV then it seems to be asymptomatic. Indeed a miracle has happened, which worried me because it made me think we might get a happy ending that would have been unearned. Thankfully Hand goes for something more bittersweet. We also are stuck with an unanswered question: Just what are the Light Children? It’s a question Hand leans into, maybe a bit too much, as if to tease us about what genre the story we’re reading belongs to; but then again it’s a question that doesn’t really need an answer.
So says Mrs. Grose:
“Well, many things, of course, we have thought They were many things, and They might be any of these or all of them or — well, none, I suppose. Fairies, or little angels of Jesus, or tree spirits — that is what a dear friend of mine believed. And some sailors thought They were will-o-the-wisps, and let’s see, Miriam Hopewell, whom you don’t remember but was another very dear friend of mine, God rest her soul, Miriam thought They came from flying saucers.”
For my money, “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is fantasy. There’s no SFnal explanation given for the Light Children being able to heal Ariel and Martin, so their healing powers may as well be magic. This does raise the question of why Mars Hill was called that in the first place, since the founders (this is the last quarter of the 19th century, mind you) could not have known where the Light Children came from, nor did they probably think much about life on other planets. The War of the Worlds was still more than a decade off. Still, not every question needs an answer.
A Step Farther Out
I do sort of recommend “Last Summer at Mars Hill,” but also reading it thirty years after publication I felt like I was gazing into a time capsule, and not entirely in a good way. The fight for queer liberation has both come a long way and not progressed nearly enough since 1994, in no small part because there are still plenty of people who believe the AIDS epidemic was basically queer people’s fault, and these same people have had their abhorrent views vindicated by those in power repeatedly. This is a story that evidently spoke to vaguely left-leaning readers when it was published, but I’m honestly not sure if it would be as warmly received now.
Brian Aldiss started out in the pages of New Worlds and Science Fantasy, those two foremost genre magazines in the UK in the ’50s, but by the end of that decade he had gained a foothold in the US, particularly finding an American home in F&SF. Given his fast-and-loose approach to genre, this makes sense. Aldiss was one of those authors who anticipated the New Wave, to the point of becoming one of its big players. (Mind you that most of the important authors involved with the New Wave, that quintessential ’60s SF movement, had debuted a decade earlier.) He had already gotten a Hugo nomination for Best New Writer (it was a Hugo at the time, don’t ask) when he wrote the stories that would comprise the fix-up novel Hothouse, one of these stories appearing every other month or so in F&SF, the resulting series winning the Hugo for Best Short Fiction—the only time in the history of the Hugos this has happened, and admittedly with good reason. I reviewed “Hothouse” a few months back with the intention of continuing the series, and so here we are with “Nomansland,” a direct sequel.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has never been reprinted on its own, although of course you can find it as part of Hothouse.
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You may recall the adults from the first story went to the moon via a network of traverser webs, grew wings, and have since ventured back to Earth to bring the children of their kind with them to the moon. Lily-yo and the others go unmentioned in “Nomansland,” as instead we’re left to focus on the young folks they had left behind, including Gren, who has emerged as the true protagonist—a position he will apparently hold for the rest of the “series.” Toy is the new matriarch of the little tribe, with the only two males of breeding age being Gren and Veggy. (The two males are probably only barely in their early teens, as the humans of this far future consider “coming of age” to be when you’re physically matured enough to be able to reproduce.) There’s obviously a rivalry going on between the males, not least because Gren is older and wiser while Veggy spends pretty much the whole story being a little dumbass. (I said, in my review of “Hothouse,” that the human characters might have personalities, but I didn’t say they would be likable personalities.) Anyway, Aldiss is still much more interested in the world of the story rather than the people in it, the few humans left feelings small both physically (they’re shorter than modern-day humans, and also have green skin) and in terms of their importance to the narrative. I get the impression that had there been no humans at all that Aldiss would find some way to make the Hothouse stories about something else.
The only one sympathetic to Gren’s plight is Poyly, who will eventually figure rather importantly into the plot (and presumably the next story in the series), but not for now. What’s important is that with “Nomansland” we’re given a couple new creatures to play with, and also a new location in the form of nomansland itself, basically the coastline of this world, the area where the single impossibly massive banyan that serves as the foundation for the world’s vegetation meets its match, the sea. It’s a case of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object, and it’s also that line where the fight for survival is at its fiercest. Aldiss could’ve written a mean script for a nature documentary if he was interested, if the Hothouse stories are any indication. There’s a cold detachment in how he describes the actions of the humans and their surroundings, but this is also mixed with a poetic sensibility that probably meant F&SF was the only appropriate outlet for this kind of story in the early ’60s. There’s a juxtaposition between Aldiss’s refusal to give the humans a Shakespearean inner life and his loving odes to the strange yet natural world he has created. It’s science-fantasy in the sense that while the basis of this world is implausible (there is, after all, a half of the world where it’s always day and the other night), Aldiss tries to give science-fictional explanations within those parameters. My favorite example of this is “Nomansland” has to be the “sand octopus,” a large tentacled beast which lurks near the coast and catches whatever on the beach it can grab, since crabs have long since gone extinct. Seemingly everything in this world is big—except for the humans.
Since “Nomansland” is a sequel to “Hothouse,” and since both stories were clearly planned as part of a series, there’s not too much I can say about one that doesn’t also apply to the other. If “Hothouse” establishes the cutthroat nature of the world then “Nomansland” expands the boundaries a bit, quite literally as Gren is spirited away by a suckerbird (which is not an actual bird) and narrowly survives, only to land at nomansland, and here the story takes on an unexpected gothic flavor. You see, real-world termites were famous for being ingenious and productive architects; so it only makes sense that the termights, their vastly larger descendants, would produce architecture of an appropriate scale—in this case a bug-made castle that Gren takes refuge in, even meeting a cat (or the descendant of cats) along the way, showing that humans are not the last vertebrate life on the planet—although this may not be true for much longer. Up this point the narrative has been geared towards action and observation, with basically no character insight allowed, which is probably intentional given what’s about to happen. If the characters seem unintelligent it’s because they simply haven’t been granted it—ingenuity, maybe, but not introspection.
There Be Spoilers Here
Gren reunites with the rest of the tribe, which turns out to not be so happy a reunion as Toy and Veggy think Gren is unfit to be the alpha male, and a close encounter with a sand octopus results in the young member of the tribe getting killed in a rather violent fashion. (There’s a girl named Fay and another named May; I think the latter gets killed. I’m not sure why Aldiss gave two characters such similar names. Maybe a way to signal their status as redshirts?) There’s a vote among the tribe and Gren is driven to exile, presumably to meet a gruesome death, and soon. But as luck would have it he comes into contact with morel, a sentient fungus that, when attached to one’s head, can not only communicate with the host telepathically but has access to something like an ancestral memory in the host’s brain. The result is that, all of a sudden, Gren is granted a level of intelligence (here conflated with knowledge) he did not have access to before, and he even convinced Poyly to share the “gift” with him. The ending of “Nomansland” is pretty unsubtly an homage to Adam and Eve getting kicked out of Eden, although here it’s framed as ultimately for the best. Gren and Poyly give up their “souls” (their wooden dolls, you may recall) and leave nomansland together in search of a brighter future. Well, not if Aldiss has anything to say about it. We’ll see in “Undergrowth,” the next story, soon enough.
A Step Farther Out
Give me a few more months and we’ll see a continuation of this series—I mean the reviews, not the stories. I have to admit as I acclimate myself more with the world of Hothouse, I start to “get” what Aldiss is doing more. The ambition of this project is perhaps better appreciates as a series of related stories than as a novel.
I wish I could say the past month has been better for me, but it has not. A big thing is happening in my life, in that today is actually the move-in date for my first apartment. Wow, imagine, at 28, my first apartment. Been taking care of the practical side of things, with assistance: furniture, stuff for the kitchen and bathroom, and of course signing up with utilities. This has been a long time coming, and truth be told I’ve become immensely tired of living with my parents. And yet I’m not happy. Moving into my own place might prove only marginally better than my previous living situation. I don’t make enough to pay for rent so I’ll be bleeding my savings for the following months. The only reason my application even got accepted is my credit score is good. I’ll be living by myself in this one-bedroom apartment. It’ll be very lonely here, as none of my partners live close enough to move in with me, and anyway, with one exception we don’t know each other that well yet. Surely the lack of my parents breathing down my neck will do me some good, but this will be a solitary existence.
Honestly I’ve been tired all the time as of late. My work schedule as of right now is erratic and I find myself going to sleep at six in the morning and waking up after noon. As you may know I have anxiety and depression, and while the former has not been as bad lately, the latter has been worse, or rather more persistent. I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of my job. I’m tired of my imperfect body, and the fact that I can barely sleep. I’m tired of being tired. The US election is in less than a week and honestly I’m sick of this fucking immoral country, and its authorities who have been spending the past couple centuries murdering socialists, queer people, ethnic minority groups, etc. We’re only a quarter into the 21st century but already I feel like almost everything that could go wrong has already gone wrong. And will get worse. I’m normally a pessimist, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I don’t see conditions improving much.
So, go backward or forward, but don’t stay here. I hate it here. I do this blog for fun, and according to stats have written 186,000 words (or about equivalent to Great Expectations in word count) this year alone; but I also do it as a coping mechanism. I don’t do it for readers, or money, because not enough people read this blog or even know about it, despite my spreading word on a few social media platforms. Maybe when I hit 200 subscribers I’ll start a Patreon. Just know I’ve been going at this for two years now because it gives me some degree of emotional security. If not for all these words I would surely have given up a minute ago.
Now, what do we have for reviewing? We have two stories from the ’40s, three from the ’60s, one from the ’80s, one from the ’90s, and one from the 2010s.
For the novellas:
“Attitude” by Hal Clement. From the September 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. Feels like it’s been a while since we last talked about Clement, who was one of the first hard SF authors as we now think of the term. Not only was Clement a pioneer, he had a pretty long life and career, remaining active into the beginning of the 21st century. His prose is workmanlike and his human characters tend to be little more than abstractions, but his lectures-as-stories can be enthralling.
“Last Summer at Mars Hill” by Elizabeth Hand. From the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novella. Over the past four decades Hand has taken a kind of jack-of-all-trades approach to writing, tackling SF, fantasy, and horror seemingly with equal relish, with even the occasional movie novelization to her credit. (She wrote the novelization of the infamous 2003 Catwoman movie.) “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is one of her most decorated stories.
For the short stories:
“Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth. From the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales. Derleth was correspondents with H. P. Lovecraft and could be argued as the person most responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s legacy, as he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in 1939 firstly to reprint his mentor’s fiction. He also wrote quite a bit of fiction in his own right.
“The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell. From the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Suspense Stories. One of August Derleth’s biggest discoveries as editor was Ramsey Campbell, whose work Derleth had discovered when he was but a teenager. Campbell’s first collection was published when he was only 18, so that he got his start in weird fiction very early. He would later become a prolific horror novelist.
“Nomansland” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Aldiss debuted in the 1950s and would remain active pretty much until his death, which was not too long ago. He would win a Short Fiction Hugo for Hothouse, which is sort of a novel but also a collection of linked stories. We already covered the first story, and now we’re on the second.
“Flowers of Edo” by Bruce Sterling. From the May 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Sterling debuted in 1977 when he was barely out of his teens, but he would become one of the defining SF writers of the ’80s. While typically labeled as cyberpunk, Sterling has a surprising versatility, with even early novels like Schismatrix and Islands in the Net being very different from each other.
“Soft Clocks” by Yoshio Aramaki. From the January-February 1989 issue of Interzone. First published in 1968. Translated by Kazuko Behrens and Lewis Shiner. Seeing as how the Sterling story takes from Japanese culture, I thought it only right (and perhaps a neat gimmick) to follow up with a story from a Japanese writer. Yoshio Aramaki has been active since the ’60s as an author and critic.
“Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.
This marks Tanith Lee’s third consecutive Halloween appearnace on this site, and why not. I wouldn’t call myself a Lee fan (yet), but as I chip away at her massive body of work I do find more to appreciate. And I do mean massive. Over the span of five decades Lee wrote something like ninety novels and 300 short stories, so we’ll be here for a while. She debuted in the late ’60s, but did not gain attention until midway through the ’70s with novels like The Birthgrave and The Storm Lord. She specialized in horror and dark fantasy at a time when this only just being made possible due to the proliferation of the mass-market paperback; had Lee tried breaking through a decade earlier she would’ve been ten years old or something she would’ve surely been screwed, due to how the market was at the time. But she did get to thrive, and write some nifty fiction while she was at it. “Red as Blood” marked Lee’s first appearance in F&SF, which is weird because it seems like the two were made for each other. No matter. I feel like I’m giving the game away by saying this now, but “Red as Blood” is a pretty neat (if at times confusing) retelling of Snow White, in a way that screams Tanith Lee. Look, dark fantasy retellings were more novel in the ’70s.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1979 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted quite a number of times, including but not limited to The Year’s Best Fantasy: 6 (ed. Lin Carter), Young Monsters (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (ed. Richard Glyn Jones and A. Susan Williams), and the Lee collections Red as Blood, or Tales of the Sisters Grimmer and Tanith by Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee.
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Once upon a time (it’s that kind of story) there was a king and his queen. The queen gave birth to a daughter, but died in childbirth. The queen (or the Queen) was also kind of an odd woman. “She never came to the window before dusk: she did not like the day.” She had black hair and dressed in a crimson gown, and had made a blood sacrifice (her own blood, not someone else’s) to gift her future daughter with certain traits, “hair black as mine, black as the wood of these warped and arcane trees. Let her have skin like mine, white as this snow. And let her have my mouth, red as my blood.” She got what she wanted, although she wouldn’t live to see her daughter grow up. The daughter is Bianca, and for the past seven years she’s been living with her stepmother, the Witch Queen. The Witch Queen is somehow both a witch and a devout Christian who is repulsed by Bianca’s aversion to churchgoing and Christian symbols; she’d much rather spend time in her garden. The thing is that her problems only just beginning.
So, this is a retelling of Snow White, as in “Snow White” by the Brothers Grimm, although we all know the Disney animated film. Lee would do this multiple times, so much that she made a whole collection of such retellings, but this was still fairly early in her career. The idea of making Bianca (Snow White) a vampire is a novel twist on the classic story. At least in the Disney film the relationship between the Witch Queen and Snow White is unclear, as the former is indeed a queen and the latter is some girl who lives in the woods, whereas in “Red as Blood” Bianca is explicitly the Witch Queen’s stepdaughter; it’s also implied the Queen was a vampire and that Bianca is following in her “true” mother’s footsteps. This is a curious role reversal because in the normal story we would see Bianca as the protagonist and the Witch Queen as the antagonist, but now the Witch Queen is not only the POV character but has the understandable goal of wanting to do something on her vampire daughter. Yet this is not a horror story! It’s dark fantasy, but Lee is not trying to scare us.
I have some theories as to what Lee is going for with this story, because this is not just a case of “What if we told this classic fairy tale but it’s FUCKED UP?,” which makes a lot of fairy tale retellings dull. No, she clearly wrote it with thematic purpose—only I’m not totally sure to what end. There’s a surprising amount of Christian symbolism going on that only intensifies as we get closer to the end. This is also a short story, so there’s only so much ground to cover, and the fact that it’s a fairy tale everyone knows (albeit with a twist or two) means it’s hard to spoil. Lee doesn’t exactly make Bianca’s vampirism a secret, the implications she drops being so heavy as to be fucking anvils. You can’t possibly miss it. But part of the fun of reading this story, aside from the beauty of Lee’s controlled, almost Bible-inspired prose, is seeing the Witch Queen, from her perspective, realize that she has one hell of a problem child on her hands. When she asks her magic mirror what the mirror sees it says it specifically can’t see Bianca. Get it? Vampires don’t have reflections? When her mother was alive there was an epidemic of “wasting sickness” in the kingdom, which was never explained and which they never found a cure for; and when Bianca comes of age (gets her first period), the “wasting sickness” starts up again.
Well this is a problem.
The Witch Queen hires a huntsman to take care of her stepdaughter, but as with the fairy tale it takes all of five minutes for the deal to backfire—only this time Bianca outright kills the huntsman and sucks his blood (he doesn’t seem to mind too much). If I had to quibble about something I do find it concerning that Bianca is depicted (at least analogous to) sexually active and desirable… at 13 years old. This is a recurring thing in ’70s SFF writing and I don’t know if we should blame Michel Foucault or what. It makes me cringe, although for what it’s worth nothing explicit happens in this case. So the huntsman is dead and the Witch Queen has to come up with a plan B, which involves making a deal with a most unusual party: Satan himself. Or more accurately Lucifer, the fallen angel. Lucifer works up a disguise for the Witch Queen that Bianca will be certain to fall for, and we can guess well in advance that the Witch Queen will become an old hag somehow. So. As for the seven dwarves Snow White befriends they’re represented here by trees in Bianca’s garden, which come to life. The only weakness the Witch Queen knows of is that Bianca finds Christian iconography repellant, maybe to the point of it being maybe physically harmful.
There Be Spoilers Here
The climax of “Red as Blood” starts weird and only gets weirder from there, to the point where it becomes honestly mind-bending. The Witch Queen gives Bianca an apple, although it turns out to not be poisoned; instead it contained (I don’t know how, maybe through witch stuff) a wafer, “a fragment of the flesh of Christ.” How Catholic. So Bianca dies and is put in a transparent glass coffin, which may sound familiar, where she lies until a prince (just a prince, from where I don’t know) comes along and revives her. It’s implied, via a mark on his wrist, “like a star,” that he is the embodiment of Christ. (People often forget Jesus would have been nailed through the wrists, not the hands, a mistake even Christmonger and antisemite Mel Gibson makes.) The bad news is that Bianca is back, but it seems the love of the prince transforms her, into a series of birds before time goes backwards to when she was seven years old—only this time not a vampire. The prince had not only reversed time but seemingly cured Bianca of her vampirism. This is… confusing. Obviously it’s meant to be taken as allegorical, and it’s so overtly Christian that I have to wonder if it’s maybe satirical, or maybe if Lee was actually a churchgoer. I’m not sure if she was religious or not, truth be told. The Witch Queen is a Christian who ultimately is in the right, but she also had to seek Lucifer’s help to deal with Bianca’s vampirism, which is certainly odd. It could be that Lee is saying we need that bit of darkness, or that there’s some evil lurking in every one of us. Or maybe, when the chips are down, we must side with a lesser evil.
A Step Farther Out
I’m a bit weary at the idea of reading a whole collection of fairy tale retellings, but as an individual story I think “Red as Blood” is quite strong. Again it’s surprising it took until 1979 for Lee to get published in F&SF, but the pairing was perfect. The more I read Lee the more I understand what she’s going for, which actually makes me wonder if I had treated “Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Fleu” unfairly when I reviewed that a couple years ago. I was not as familiar with Lee at the time.
As we approach the climax of this year-long tribute to F&SF, it’s about time we cover an author who was also one-time editor of that magazine. There’ve been a few writers who also picked up the editing torch with F&SF (Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and most recently Sheree Renée Thomas), but Avram Davidson might’ve been the most prepped to become editor, although his tenure would be short. He debuted in F&SF in 1954 with “My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello” and would remain a quirky presence in that magazine (among others) for many years to come. By the time he became editor in 1962 he was already a Hugo winner, for his 1958 SF-horror story “Or All the Seas with Oysters.” Under Davidson F&SF took on a rather different character from both before and after, making it something of a black sheep era for the magazine. After he stepped down from editing Davidson went back to writing regularly, with a vengeance. Known mostly for standalone stories, Davidson started the episodic Jack Limekiller series in the ’70s, of which today’s story is the second entry. “Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight” shows its age nowadays, and its big twist is obvious (perhaps by design), but it does have, as Edward L. Ferman says, quite the atmosphere.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Year’s Finest Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr), Under South American Skies (ed. Gardner Dozois and Mike Resnick), Modern Classics of Fantasy (ed. Gardner Dozois), and the Davidson collections Limekiller! and The Avram Davidson Treasury.
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The first question is, who is Jack Limekiller? He’s a Canadian expat, apparently from Toronto, which goes to explain a lot. The Limekiller stories have a strong international flavor, being set in “British Hidalgo” (there’s also an independent sister country called Spanish Hidalgo “though it had not been Spain’s for a century and a half”), a fictional South American country that, despite these stories being set very much post-World War II (although not much more specific than that), is still under British guardianship. What does Limekiller do for a living? Not sure. Supposedly he deals in trading, but for the whole course of this story he’s not doing work at all; on the contrary, he spends some of it thinking of ways to avoid his creditors. He has some debt he’s not currently able to pay off. The good news is that despite the inherent exploitation required in maintaining a colony like British Hidalgo, and also the fact (this is not a spoiler really) that “Manatee Gal” will turn into borderline Lovecraftian horror down the road, things are easy-going here. Limekiller’s main creditor will probably catch up with him, but not tonight, or tomorrow either. He’s a bit of a wish-fulfillment character, in that he is too individualistic (and maybe too drunk) to work a 9-to-5 job, but he’s still very cool and sociable, and we know in advance that he’ll come out of whatever weird situation Davidson tosses his way basically unscathed. Everybody around Limekiller, on the other hand…
Something tricky Davidson does in the first few pages is set up the first of a few mysteries, the only thing being we’re unlikely to take it as a mystery that needs solving. Bob Blaine, a notorious trader in these parts, has gone missing. This will not come up again until much later, so put a pin in that one. This is less about the plot and more about the place and characters. British Hidalgo is somewhere in South America but seems as home to Caribbeans and white Europeans, including folks like Limekiller. The most elusive of these characters would have to be John Samuel, a white Creole with one eye, and Captain Cudgel, a mysterious old man who frequents the same bar Limekiller goes to. Cudgel is more of a walking mystery while Samuel is a bit of an eccentric; it’s a shame I can barely understand what the latter is saying. A problem I encountered almost immediately here is that most of the characters have some kind of “accent,” and Davidson writes them out phonetically—maybe a little too much. Davidson traveled around a lot, in fact if I remember right he edited F&SF while living in Mexico, which posed a problem; but that doesn’t automatically give one license to give non-white (or also in this case, as with Samuel, white characters who are not from the US or Canada) goofy accents that are hard to parse. He even does the “t’ing” thing for Caribbean characters, except he applies that logic to seemingly every other word, the result being a meaty novelette that’s rather chatty, and much of that dialogue is hard to read.
“Manatee Gal” has a loose plot, made up more of episodes than a cohesive narrative, so with that said my favorite part is one that is only very loosely related to the overarching mystery, in which Limekiller (seemingly because he has nothing better to do) gets taken on a ride to Shiloh, the remnants of a Confederate colony that had been founded in British Hidalgo over a century, and which still hosts a small group of people who are making a decent living. The colony “had not been wiped out in a year or two, like the Mormon colonies in Mexico—there had been no Revolution here, no gringo-hating Villistas—it had just ebbed away.” But still there’s something left. Colonialism always leaves scars. Of course, Limekiller and Davidson don’t seriously question the ghost-like presence colonialism has on the land, the past haunting the present. The idea seems to be that these expats and settlers will eventually wither away, as with Shiloh, or get killed off (burn out or fade away, your choice), but then, while the dinosaurs did go extinct, they left a certain feathered animal behind as their legacy. British Hidalgo is a scarred land, and clearly haunted, but not just by supernatural creatures. The double-edged sword of Davidson’s setting is that because it’s fictitious it also means Davidson is free to put his thumb on the scales, so to speak. There is no place on Earth quite like British Hidalgo, which does lend a surreal quality to it, perfect for supernatural shenanigans, but also it’s ultimately a white author’s exotic fantasy land.
There Be Spoilers Here
Manatees get brought up from time to time throughout the story. Sea-cows. They’re cute, harmless marine mammals, but Davidson also raises kind of an odd question: There are all kinds of were-animals, not just werewolves, so why not a were-manatee? Someone who is amphibious, who can change between a person on land and a manatee in the water, just off the coast. They do eventually find Bob Blaine—or what’s left of him. Something had killed him. We never see the were-manatee, but the implication is that Samuel is the killer, although he is never seen again. Limekiller connects some dots and comes to the conclusion that such a creature could exist, here, in British Hidalgo. But of course that’s not his problem. Limekiller’s debt problem also clears itself up at the last minute, as a freak accident has led to his trading position (namely his boat) becoming very sought after again. All’s well ends well, more or less. Nothing will fundamentally change. We would see Limekiller again, even I don’t.
A Step Farther Out
I’ve not read a great deal of Avram Davidson for the simple reason I find him to be a little too quirky and at times misogynistic (basically the same reason I don’t often read R. A. Lafferty), and admittedly “Manatee Gal” might be too obtuse for a story with ultimately such a straightforward reveal. I also get the impression that, given Limekiller is wearing a thick coat of plot armor with this series, there’s no real sense of danger. Limekiller comes upon a mystery or two, connects a few dots, goes “Well that’s weird,” and moves on, perhaps taking comfort in the knowledge that said weirdness won’t happen to him. I also struggle to believe the exoticism of the locale would fly as well if published today, but judging by awards attention for this and future Limekiller stories there was clearly an audience for it back in ye olden times. I’m also pretty sure Lucius Shepard read it and got a few ideas, so you could say it’s influential in kind of a niche way.
It’s been a hot minute since I last talked about Joanna Russ on this site, although it has in fact not been long since I last wrote about her period. I reviewed her 1971 story “Poor Man, Beggar Man” for Young People Read Old SFF, and I wasn’t a fan of it. I have mixed feelings on Russ’s fiction (although not her criticism, which I generally love), in part because it seems to me that she wrote her fiction with the intention of it being more studied than enjoyed; and I think fiction, if nothing else, should be read for pleasure—even if it’s a morbid kind of pleasure, like reading horror for the sake of feeling scared or unnerved. The Russ stories I like most tend to be fun, but with a venomous bite that also lurks in her criticism. It’s why I have yet to read her supposed magnum opus, The Female Man, because frankly it doesn’t look like a very fun novel. Russ’s seriousness (with some sardonic humor) paid off in the long run, though, as ten years after her death she’s now one of the most studied and lauded of the New Wave writers, even recently getting a Library of America volume. As with some of Russ’s other fiction I enjoyed thinking about today’s story more than actually reading it, which is not to say I don’t recommend it. “My Boat” is ostensibly horror and set in the Cthulhu Mythos, but while it’s a bit of horror and a bit of fantasy, it could be described more accurately as fantastic metafiction. It’s a story about a story, more about the Mythos than set in it.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has been reprinted in The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF (ed. Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim), The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 22nd Series (ed. Edward L. Ferman), Sorcerers! (ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois), Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (editor uncredited), and the Russ collection The Zanzibar Cat.
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Jim is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter on the phone with Milt, his agent, about a story—not a script story but something from Jim’s early life which for some reason he is compelled to share now. “It’s something that happened to me in high school in 1952 and I just want to tell someone. I don’t care if no station from here to Indonesia can use it; you just tell me whether I’m nuts or not, that’s all.” Two decades earlier, when Jim was 17, his high school became one of the first in the state to integrate; segregation had been the norm up to this point, and would continue to be the norm for most of the country for the coming decade. In 1952 the civil rights movement was still in utero; it was the year Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man hit store shelves, but otherwise there was no MLP, no Malcolm X, James Baldwin had not yet broken through as a novelist, the “race issue” was talked about but there was no mobilization yet. Emmett Till was very much alive (he would be 83 today). Jim recalls that when his high school integrated only a handful of black kids came in initially, and Cissie Jackson was one of them—a scrawny 15-year-old girl who seemed like she wouldn’t amount to anything but who was, almost in spite of her physical limitations, a gifted actress. She was a drama club regular. She was also supposedly crazy. Her father had been murdered, which if anything made her more world-weary.
You know Malcolm X saw his father killed by white men when he was four and that made him a militant for life? Well, Cissie’s father had been shot down in front of her eyes when she was a little kid—we learned that later on—only it didn’t make her militant; it just made her so scared of everybody and everything that she’d withdraw into herself and wouldn’t speak to anybody for weeks on end. Sometimes she’d withdraw right out of this world and then they’d send her to the loony bin; believe me, it was all over school in two days. And she looked it; she’d sit up there in the school theater—oh, Milty, the Island high schools had money, you better believe it!—and try to disappear into the last seat like some little scared rabbit. She was only four eleven anyhow, and maybe eighty-five pounds sopping wet.
Then there’s a white friend of Jim’s, Alan, who was a bit of a weirdo, being into Lovecraft at a time when this was very much not a cool thing to like. Lovecraft’s legacy had already been more or less secured at this point, but Alan would’ve been almost certainly branded as an outcast, a 17-year-old boy who was into cosmic horror and weird fiction. Maybe it’s because they were both outcasts, albeit in different ways, but Alan and Cissie took a liking to each other, becoming friends with Jim as the third wheel. “She got better and better friends with Al, and when they let me tag along, I felt privileged. He loaned her some of those crazy books of his and I overheard things about her life, bits and pieces.” Cissie comes from a very religious household, with a very strict mother. Of course it’s hard to blame Cissie’s mom for being so uptight, being wife to a murdered husband and mother to a girl who is entering a newly integrated school. One quibble I have with this story, or I suppose one way it shows its age, is the way Cissie’s mental illness is discussed, or rather how it is not. It’s pretty clear Cissie has PTSD at the very least, although Jim doesn’t use that term and it wouldn’t have been part of his vocabulary. Despite being the character upon whom the plot hinges Cissie is kept totally closed off from us, as a person, which is part of the point, but it also—I guess “exoticizes” is a fine enough word for it. Her mental illness is exoticized and made to be part of the “weirdness” of the story, which I don’t think would go over well today. Some of her dialogue can also border on caricatured, although Russ means well, and anyway you could make the excuse that this is merely Jim’s recollecting of events. It’s possible Cissie did not talk like how Jim makes her sound.
I called “My Boat” fantastic metafiction, but it’s also very much allegorical, a fact that only becomes more apparent as the story progresses. Jim is telling Milt, his agent, this story as if it had literally happened, but it becomes increasingly clear to the reader (if not poor Milt) that Jim is sort of talking in code; maybe he really believes in the strange events he’s about to relate, but these events also stand in for something that would’ve happened in the normal world. The friendship sparked between Alan and Cissie might be developing into something more, which would’ve been taboo at the time, to the point where both could’ve been killed if their relationship was discovered. They trusted Jim enough to have him tag along as the third wheel, although by Jim’s own admission he was barely aware enough of racial strife at the time to understand what their relationship could’ve meant. Jim as a grown man in his thirties doesn’t seem to think fondly of his younger self, calling him a “run-of-the-mill, seventeen-year-old, white, liberal racist” who was simply not as open-minded as Alan. I wouldn’t say Jim is an autobiographical sketch of Russ, because aside from the gender difference there are too many other basic differences between the two (for one I’m sure Russ would shudder at the thought of writing for Hollywood), but he could be read as Russ criticizing her own upbringing. Russ was a leftist, but the thing is that most leftists were not brought up that way; maybe they were raised liberal, or like me they were raised conservative. Regardless adopting leftist politics is a long and rather winding process, and part of that process is admitting that the ideology of your parents is inadequate for dealing with real-world problems. Jim was raised liberal, but this did not prepare him for two of his friends falling in love.
This brings us to My Boat, which is the name of a rowboat with only one oar, a kind of secret place for Cissie and Alan, and which Jim is allowed to visit one day. Of course it turns out to be much more than a rowboat—rather it acts as a gateway into other parts of the world, across different periods of history, and even maybe to other worlds. In what is admittedly a confusing development Cissie and Alan take on different personae, becoming full-grown adults before Jim’s eyes and taking on the guises of historical figures. Cissie becomes the Queen of Sheba (although she says it’s Saba) while Alan becomes Francis Drake. A warrior queen and an explorer. Al’s fondness for Lovecraft, the way Lovecraft’s works expanded his imagination, allowed him to come along with Cissie, and in this sense Russ is celebrating Lovecraft. Mind you that even in the ’70s it was not unheard of to denounce Lovecraft as a reactionary, racist, etc., as Michael Moorcock’s essay “Starship Stormtroopers” came out a year after “My Boat.” Moorcock saw Lovecraft as massively overrated, never mind problematic, while Russ seems to understand Lovecraft’s limitations (as both a person and writer) while also showing that she’s read enough of his work out of what has to be a genuine fondness. “My Boat” is about a few things: racism, regret, memory, and of course how fiction might bleed into our reality—not as in the Cthulhu Mythos might become real but rather how the Mythos might inspire someone. Of course the Mythos wasn’t even called that until after Lovecraft’s death (courtesy of August Derleth), and “My Boat” is too metafictional (and I would say too not-horror) to be thrown in with the classic Mythos stories. It’s a story that struggles with categorization.
There Be Spoilers Here
The tragedy of the situation is that Jim turned down going along with Cissie and Alan on their magical boat. “I didn’t want that knowledge, Milt. I didn’t want to go that deep. It was the kind of thing most seventeen-year-olds don’t learn for years: Beauty. Despair. Mortality. Compassion. Pain.” The door had been closed on him, or rather he had refused to open it, much to his regret. He never saw Cissie again after that day. He did eventually see Alan again, twenty years later, the strange part being that Alan had not aged during that time: he was still that 17-year-old. (I wanna point out that there’s no science-fictional explanation for any of this, and that if what Jim says is true then this story is firmly in the realm of fantasy, not SF.) After Cissie and Alan went missing Jim got to meet Cissie’s mom, who was not the Aunt Jemima caricature he had in his head: she was scrawny and nerve-wracked, like her daughter, and very much human. Jim as an adult chastises his younger self’s unconscious racism. In recent years Jim has taken to reading up on Marxism and feminism, apparently having shifted more to the left end of the political spectrum. He’s also been reading Lovecraft. The ending is bittersweet, or rather bitter with a little ray of hope, that maybe it’s not too late for Jim to get back in touch with Cissie—wherever she’s gone. Surely she couldn’t have left him behind forever.
A Step Farther Out
Do you need to be familiar with Lovecraft’s works to “get” what “My Boat” is going for? Not really, although Russ makes references that would otherwise go over one’s head. For example I’ve not yet read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, so I’m not sure how Russ incorporates it into her narrative. I’m not exactly a fan of Lovecraft, so I mostly read “My Boat” on its own terms. It’s not really a horror story, and it isn’t scary except maybe in an existential sense; what it really does well is tell a story about an interracial couple, a mutual friend of the two young lovers, and give such an earthly story metafictional implications.
Everyone has their preferences when it comes to genre, which makes sense; there are only so many hours in the day, and time plus one’s temperament equals a preference for literature that seeks to entrance, excite, and/or titillate. We also like to be scared sometimes, or at the very least uneased. I’ll be honest with you, when someone tells me they simply have no appetite for horror I’m tempted to give them the side-eye. As far as my own genre preferences go I would put horror only behind science fiction—and not by much. The key difference is that I can enjoy SF at really any length, whereas I very much believe horror is at its best at short story and novella lengths, which is an old-school belief not least because the novel has dominated horror since at least the ’80s.
The conventional narrative (and I do think this is more or less accurate) is that prior to the ’70s, horror had at most fleeting moments of mainstream recognition. There were exceptions, but they were exceptions that proved the rule. Maybe ever few years you got a horror novel that reached bestseller status. But then, in the ’70s, what had been a once-in-a-blue-moon thing became something of a trend, arguably started when William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Richard Matheson’s Hell House both came out in 1971. In the film world the influx of horror can be explained by the advent of the MPAA rating system combined with independent studios like New World Pictures pumping out exploitation cinema by the truckload, but in the literary world the rise of horror is harder to explain—except for one thing. Stephen King had been writing since the late ’60s, but his debut novel Carrie became a bestseller when it was published in 1974, and the crazy part is that noy only did King (a snotty 26-year-old at the time) gain overnight success, he managed to sustain it with more hits. The meteor shower that was King in the ’70s brought a change to horror that it had not seen before, and frankly will probably never see again. Many writers (some of whom are more elegant than King) would hop on the horror bandwagon, but none can be said to have reached King’s level.
While the horror novel was in, the short story was not so much. For most of the ’70s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was the only genre magazine to publish horror with any regularity. Magazine of Horror did mostly reprints, and by 1972 was no more, while Weird Tales had a brief revival in the early ’70s, only to go dormant again. So it was up to F&SF to pick up the slack. For the magazine’s 75th anniversary, and in covering short stories from the ’70s, we’ll be focusing more on horror, dark fantasy, and spooky science fiction. These are mostly the usual suspects when it comes to horror, but there are one or two surprises.
For the short stories:
“Longtooth” by Edgar Pangborn. From the January 1970 issue. One of the most criminally overlooked SF writers of the ’50s through the ’70s, Pangborn wrote some pretty touching fiction that went against the rather hard-headed norm of the times. He would spend the last decade or so of his life on a post-apocalyptic continuity, but “Longtooth” is both a standalone and detour into horror.
“The Smell of Death” by Dennis Etchison. From the October 1971 issue. Etchison started writing in the ’60s, but he gained more prominence in the following decade as the horror boom for film and novels had kind of a trickle-down effect. He would also later become acclaimed as an editor, on top of writing, winning the World Fantasy Award multiple times for his horror-centered anthologies.
“In the Pines” by Karl Edward Wagner. From the August 1973 issue. Wagner debuted in 1970 and would remain a mainstay of horror and heroic fantasy until his untimely death in 1994. Last time we read Wagner it was one of his Kane stories, but “In the Pines” is an early example of his mastery of scares. I believe this also marks his only appearance in the pages of F&SF.
“The Same Dog” by Robert Aickman. From the December 1974 issue. Aickman has a reputation as a writer’s writer, with good reason, being your favorite horror writer’s favorite horror writer. He debuted in the early ’50s but remained a hidden gem in the UK until the ’70s. Aickman would appear in F&SF several times throughout this decade, with “The Same Dog” being an original publication.
“The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign” by Manly Wade Wellman. From the March 1975 issue. Wellman remained a presence in American fantasy writing for six decades, and especially in the latter half worked to evoke the rural mysteries of his adopted home state of North Carolina. For better or worse Wellman’s most authentic fiction is distinctly Southern in flavor, this story being one example.
“My Boat” by Joanna Russ. From the January 1976 issue. Known much more for her SF and criticism, a fair amount of Russ’s fiction (especially early on) was horror, such that even some of her SF oozes with a certain existential dread. She even wrote a few stories set in the Cthulhu Mythos, of which “My Boat” is one. I suspect this will be a Lovecraft pastiche with a Russ-type twist or two.
“Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight” by Avram Davidson. From the April 1977 issue. This will be the first time we’ll be reading a story by one of F&SF‘s editors. Davidson was already a respected writer when he took over F&SF for a few years in the early ’60s, injecting the magazine with eccentricity. This story is actually the second in an episodic series starring Jack Limekiller.
“Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” by Charles L. Grant. From the March 1978 issue. Grant got his start in the ’60s and would soon become one of the moodier and more experimental horror writers of the following decade, winning awards for his efforts. Truth be told, I’ve not been keen on the Grant I’ve read, but as I’ve said before, I’m usually open to giving authors another chance.
“Red as Blood” by Tanith Lee. From the July 1979 issue. This is the third consecutive time Lee’s appearing on my October slate, although this won’t be the case next year for reasons I’ll give… in due time. But for now it’s safe to say I’ve warmed up to Lee, gradually, and can see how for decades she was a mainstay of horror and dark fantasy. “Red As Blood” marked her first appearance in F&SF.
(Cover by Gerard Quinn. Science Fantasy, February 1963.)
Sometimes I get confused by my own schedule, which is to say the rotation method I used is one I’m not sure I always abide. Do I do eight reviews this month, or nine? How many days are in September? Thirty. But that doesn’t matter now. August was a pain and a half for me, for a few reasons. I went on vacation with family, which wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows (although I at least got PTO from that), not helped by there being I guess you could say a changing of the guard in my polycule. One of my partners dumped me. We’d been together about three months, and it was a pretty intense pairing. They (I say that because they’re non-binary) ultimately didn’t feel comfortable being with someone who is polyamorous. That’s the short of it. It sucks, and I’m still feeling sore from it, although I suppose this is the kind of loss you have to accept with a polycule. But it hasn’t been all bad! We did also welcome a new member recently, and she’s very cute. She’s not used to polyamory (the last polycule she was in didn’t work out), but she’s patient and so far things have been going pretty well for us.
On to shit that matters more, the Hugos happened this past month, and I actually got to vote in them—not that it mattered too much. I only felt qualified to vote in about half a dozen categories, although I did vote in Best Short Story (the #1 on my slate didn’t win :/), and I think this was also the first time I was poised to review a Hugo nominee which then went on to win by the time my review was published (Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine,” a very fine pick). Next year’s Worldcon is to be held in Seattle, which hey, that’s only on the other side of the country for me. I should get to work on attending, since I can feasibly do that. Worldcon 2026 is also gonna be held in LA, so that’s… two American Worldcons in a row. That’s a bit weird. But I can’t complain too much.
As for this months reviews, we have a few birthdays! John Brunner would be celebrating his 90th birthday on the 24th (had he not died in 1995), which is crazy considering one would think he was maybe a decade older. Stephen King (who is very much alive) is celebrating his 77th birthday on the 21st. Something I’ve started to think about is the decades I’m pulling from with my story choices, because given how the magazine market has ebbed and flowed over the years there are a few boom periods that would get more attention than others. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve had to try to not pick material from the ’50s too often, and indeed there are no ’50s stories this month! We have three from the ’60s, two from the ’80s, two from the ’90s, and one from the 2020s. A couple these would be horror outings, as a prelude to next month’s shenanigans.
Now let’s see…
For the novellas:
“Green Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson. From the September 1985 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Robinson is one of the most respected living SF writers, for his hard-science credentials but also for being one of the few openly leftist writers in the field over the age of sixty. Worth mentioning that this novella has nothing to do with Robinson’s award-winning Mars trilogy, although it does apparently share continuity with a few other stories set on Mars—just not the Mars of that trilogy. And also I heard Robinson would take some ideas from this early Mars story and reuse them for the trilogy.
“Some Lapse of Time” by John Brunner. From the February 1963 issue of Science Fantasy. Low-key one of the more tragic figures in classic SF, Brunner was something of a prodigy, making his debut while still a teenager. He also wrote full-time in the ’50s and ’60s, at a time when that wasn’t considered all too viable for genre writers, and money was an issue. Brunner wrote so much that a lot of his short fiction hasn’t been collected more than once, or at least not in my lifetime. “Some Lapse of Time” has not seen print since Lyndon B. Johnson was in office, so let’s see if it’s a hidden gem or not.
For the short stories:
“The Transcendent Tigers” by R. A. Lafferty. From the February 1964 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. Lafferty has a reputation as something of a writer’s writer, and there’s a reason for this: nobody writes quite like Lafferty. I’m not a fan of him, because I often find him overly quirky, but I’m all for giving authors another chance. I went out of my way to pick a relatively obscure Lafferty story.
“Angels in Love” by Kathe Koja. From the July 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I’ve only read short stories by her so far (I do have The Cipher, her first novel, on my shelf), but I can already say Koja is becoming one of my favorite horror writers. She’s turned more to YA in recent years, but her early stuff is vicious, snarky, and at times genuinely disturbing.
“Craphound” by Cory Doctorow. From the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. Acclaimed as both a writer and commentator on the state of tech and surveillance, Doctorow has probably kept a thumb on the pulse of the post-internet zeitgeist more than any other living SF writer. “Craphound” is a very early story, but Doctorow thinks fondly enough of it to have named his blog after it.
“Crazy Beautiful” by Cat Rambo. From the March-April 2021 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Rambo is a no-nonsense Texan who’s been active in the field for the past twenty years, more or less. They’ve been most prolific as a short story writer and editor, but have also recently taken to writing novels. Their latest novel, Rumor Has It, is due out from Tor later this month.
“Beachworld” by Stephen King. From the Fall 1984 issue of Weird Tales. Really needs no introduction, but let’s do it. King started writing in the ’60s, a fact people tend to forget because Carrie, his first novel, didn’t come out until 1974. Then the rest was history. He’s known firstly as a horror writer, but he’s also ventured into basically every genre under the sun, “Beachworld” being SF-horror.
“David’s Daddy” by Rosel George Brown. From the June 1960 issue of Fantastic. Brown made her debut in 1958 and quickly established herself as a short fiction writer; a large portion of her fiction would be published between 1958 and 1963. In one of SF’s many lost futures, Brown could’ve gone on to fit in with the New Wave feminists, had she not died in 1967, at only 41 years old.
(Cover by Lawrence. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, March 1944.)
Who Goes There?
One of the most beloved Christian apologists of his era, G. K. Chesterton came to prominence in the Edwardian era as a kind of jack of all trades when it came to writing, being a prolific essayist, poet, and short story writer. His Father Brown mysteries were pretty popular during Chesterton’s life and remain very much in print. (Curiously Chesterton came up with his Catholic priest detective character long before he himself converted to Catholicism.) His religious treatises Heretics and Orthodoxy were partly responses to avowed atheists of the era, such as George Bernard Shaw (Chesterton and Shaw were good friends, for the record), and partly to help those who considered themselves defenders of the faith in what was becoming a more secular England. You don’t have to be Catholic, or even Christian (as indeed I’m not), to enjoy Chesterton’s writing, since he tended to be very funny, and had kind of an Oscar Wilde-esque penchant for zingers. He’s a much finer prose stylist than H. G. Wells, his close contemporary, friend, and in some ways his foil. He also wrote his fair share of fantasy, including what is perhaps his single most famous work, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, one of the great novels of the 20th century.
Of course, how The Man Who Was Thursday counts as fantasy can be a point of contention with people, to the point where folks in the Famous Fantastic Mysteries letters column were wondering if it might even qualify as fantastic enough—although they enjoyed the novel as a whole. 1908 would be a bit of an annus mirabilis for Chesterton, as it saw the publications of both The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy, and despite being on its face an espionage novel (an early example of that genre) The Man Who Was Thursday might be as concerned with Christianity as Chesterton’s religious tracts. This is a reread for me, although I have to admit I mostly just stuck to the complete text rather than its FFM publication. I said in an earlier post that the novel’s FFM printing seems to be unabridged, but doing a side-by-side comparison between the Project Gutenberg text and FFM version for random passages show that the novel has been subtly abridged, from about 57,000 words to maybe 55,000—a difference the casual reader might not notice. Chapters and scenes remain intact, but sentences and even parts of sentences are occasionally tossed out the window, I have to assume for length but also for little flourishes that the editor (Mary Gnaedinger) might’ve considered a little too verbose.
Placing Coordinates
First published in 1908 and reprinted in the March 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which for some reason is not on Internet Archive. It is on Luminist at least, so there’s that. I will say, however, that aside from the novelty of Lawrence’s interiors (which are quite good) and a slightly altered text, I would simply read it on Project Gutenberg, it being in the public domain and all. Paperback copies are also not hard to find in the wild, this being a fairly well-known classic novel.
Enhancing Image
The Man Who Was Thursday is a masterpiece, and when it comes to novels as fine and yet weird as this one the question we have to ask ourselves is not “How did he do it?” but rather “How did he get away with it?” How did Chesterton get away with writing this? It’s what we would now call trippy, there’s certainly a hallucinatory effect that intensifies as the novel progresses; but it’s also a deeply Christian and at the same time political novel. Not only is anarchism mentioned but it’s the political ideology that takes center stage, at a time when anarchism in the US and England was gaining some very bad mainstream press, most infamously (at least for Americans) with Leon Czolgosz assassinating William McKinley in 1901. This novel was written in the 1900s, and presumably is set in that decade, what with there being “motor-cars” that predate the Ford Model T. So Chesterton introduces us to Saffron Park, a London suburb. These are not, however, the fog- and mud-covered streets of London as described at the beginning of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House; instead it’s a whimsical and implicitly fantastic introduction that hints at the madness to come. We’re introduced to Gabriel Syme, not as you would normally describe the protagonist in a narrative, but like the subjective viewpoint in a lucid dream—an angle Chesterton is going for quite deliberately. Between the novel’s subtitle and this opening passage about the people of Saffron Park it’s clear, at least with hindsight, that Chesterton is setting us up for something, only we’re not given to thinking anything is amiss at first. Not even Syme suspects what he’s in for, poor bastard. I could quote the whole passage, but I won’t.
We meet Syme and his friend/rival Lucian Gregory, who considers himself not only an earnest poet but a genuien anarchist—possibly the realest. Syme claims Gregory is full of shit, and so Gregory takes him on a journey to prove that he is, indeed, the realest. Gregory is quite the character, and I’m gonna frontload this review with discussion of him since once we get through the first few chapters we won’t see him again until the very end of the novel. It isn’t apparent at first, but Gregory will serve a major symbolic purpose, on top of being reponsible for kicking off the plot, being a tenacious red-haired man, someone who considers himself both a genuine creator (a poet, or an artist) and a genuine destroyer (anarchist) “a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.” He is contrasted with his sister Rosamond, who similarly has fiery red hair but whose demeanor is much kinder; she’s a minor character, and like Gregory she’s gonna be absent for most of the novel, but we’ll eventually get back to her. Indeed we have no choice but to remember Rosamond, as she will be the only female character of any importance. I said this is a great novel, I didn’t say it would be all that egalitarian. As for Syme and Gregory, whom Chesterton calls at one point “these two fantastics” (these are not realistic characters, or even actors on a stage, but water-colored figures in a fairy tale), the two take a trip to what turns out to be the entrance to a secret lair, with a password and everything. The password in question is “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain,” which is funny considering Gregory and other anarchists would have to recite the name of a notorious conservative politician of the time.
Political humor. Tehe.
Before we continue with the plot, I wanna stop for a moment to illustrate how the FFM printing occasionally removes sentences or sentence fragments, seemingly to achieve a punchier effect in places where Chesterton is being verbose, such that these passages would be considered the least necessary. Readers wouldn’t have missed out on much, but what they did miss would’ve often been little juicy nuggets of prose. Take this passage for example, in which Syme and Gregory are traversing the secret passage which leads to the Council’s hideout. I’ve bracketed the section which the FFM printing excludes:
They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs[, and the very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.]
Sure, we don’t need to know that last fragment, as it doesn’t further the plot or action, but it sounds better than simply “They were bombs.” Anyway, Gregory is convinced he’s gonna be the new Thursday in the Council of the Days, a league of European anarchists, the best and most fiendish the movement has to offer. Each member of the Council takes on an alias after a day of the week, and the previous Thursday died recently. There’s gonna be a vote tonight. Syme and Gregory have each sworn a secret to each other, which each party is to keep to himself—a tragic development for Gregory, given Syme’s secret is that he’s actually an undercover cop. Gregory just led a cop into a den of anarchists. What a dumbass. But all is not lost, as Syme is not only here by himself, unable to call for backup, but he’s also sworn that he’d keep the hideout a secret. Since these men are English, their word turns out to be good enough. The Man Who Was Thursday is a uniquely British novel in several ways, not the least of them being that if this were an American story Syme wouldn’t give a fuck about keeping a secret with a man who evidently sees him as an adversary once he reveals his true identity. To make matters worse, while Gregory is poised to become the new Thursday, Syme comes in with an improvised speech that blows Gregory’s out of the water, and the despite the fact that surely nobody at the meeting would have seen Syme before he wins the vote and becomes the new Thursday. More or less on a whim, it sseems. Gregory is not happy about this, and it’s hard to blame him considering once Syme becomes Thursday Gregory will vanish from the narrative until the end.
Syme is the main character, so let’s talk about him. Syme is not your conventional hero, or even much of a heroic figure. I’m not just saying this because he’s a cop. Having descended from a line of eccentrics, Syme has become neurotic about his family of nonconformists and has gone in the total opposite direction—of being in favor of order to the point of lunacy. We’re treated to what I remember as being the only conventional flashback in the whole novel, in which we’re given Syme’s backstory, how he had a chance meeting with an unusually philosophically-minded policeman, and of his encounter with a mysterious man in “the dark room,” evidently not seeing the man’s face but being given the lofty job of policeman. His job thus was to go undercover and infiltrate the Council of the Days, to put a stop to the anarchist movement in England from the inside. This is a bit of an unusual scene since it breaks away from what is otherwise is a more or less linear narrative, but we do get an explanation for Syme’s strange obsession with the anarchists, not to mention we get some really good lines from the cop he talks to. A little quibble I have with this book, which I think comes close to perfect on the whole, is that the pacing does go kind of sideways. The first two chapters are a perfect setup-payoff affair, totally engrossing and with a promising of escalating tension, only for the narrative to jump backwards abruptly momentarily. I also have to admit that once Gregory leaves the novel and we’re introduced to the Council that the plot sort of funnels, or rather that there’s a snowball effect in which you have a straight shot to the climax over the course of about a hundred pages. Most of this novel can feel like one long chase sequence.
So we meet the Council, who will accompany Syme as main characters for the rest of the novel, although some members get more attention than others. It’s a bit of an ensemble effort, and Chesterton doesn’t give himself too much wordage. With how many ideas it throws at the reader The Man Who Was Thursday could’ve easily been double its length if published today, but Chesterton, being accustomed to short-length works like poems and essays, wasn’t much of a novelist, or rather he didn’t have the prolonged stamina expected of the writer who thinks themself a novelist first. Instead he hits the reader with a shotgun blast of symbols and characters. None of the members of the Council is very developed, individually, but they prove to be greater than the sum of their parts. There is, of course, Sunday, the head of the Council, an almost impossibly large man with a face that could take up the whole sky—a character not too dissimilar from Chesterton, for his physical largness but also his charima. There’s Monday, only otherwise known as the Secretary, who acts as Sunday’s right-hand man and most devoted follower, and who delivers one of the novel’s most memorable lines: “A man’s brain is a bomb.” There’s Gogol as Tuesday, a cartoonish Pole among mostly Englishmen—although it turns out that “Gogol” is, in fact, a Cockney policeman in disguise. There’s the Marquis de St. Eustache as Wednesday, a noble Frenchman who acts as if he jumped out of one of Alexandre Dumas’s novels. There’s my personal favorite, Professor de Worms as Friday, who’s so old and dicrepit that Syme wonders how he even made it to the Council meeting. Finally there’s Dr. Bull as Saturday, a young and mischievous yet enigmatic fellow whose “smoked spectacles” hide his eyes. These are basically cartoon characters, but whereas that would be considered shallow writing in realistic fiction, Chesterton uses the men’s broad-strokes characterizations for humor, as well as symbolic purposes.
Sunday outs Gogol as an undercover cop at the meeting, although despite Gogol being a cop Sunday doesn’t have him killed or anything; in what I have to admit is a confusing turn of events Sunday just… lets Gogol go free? The poor Cockney has a fall down the stairs by accident, but he’s fine, and we even see him much later in the novel safe and sound. But since Gogol is the first Council member to be outed as a cop he also gets the least time to shine; it’s a good thing, then, that his one scene where he’s the focus is pretty funny. I’m sorry, did I say “first” Council member to be outed as a cop? Well that’s because Syme and Gogol aren’t the only cops in the Council. It’s hard to say what counts as spoilers for this novel, since I’ve seen people argue that even the ending doesn’t really count as a spoiler, seeing as how the subtitle anticipates. It’s also easy to see, on a second reading, how Chesterton sets up his novel as a work of fantasy (albeit surreal rather than “high” or “low” fantasy) from the very beginning. Certainly the series of events here soon proves to be improbable, if not outright fantastic. What are the odds of there being multiple policement undercover in the Council of Days, and that these cops would be unaware of each other’s missions? Syme didn’t know who Gogol really was, and after some investigating he comes to find he didn’t know who Professor de Worms was either—not a horribly old nihilist but a relatively young actor who took on the role of a real man he once met named Professor de Worms. Wilks, the cop who has been impersonating de Worms, uses makeup and body language for the sake of a performance. Like Syme, Wilks is a man of order who has such a disdain for disorder (or, as he says, nihilism) that he comes out looking half insane for it. Chesterton seems to be saying that police and anarchist, both driven in their ideals to the point of mania, are two sides of the same coin. It goes to explain why Syme and Gregory are opposites, yet they have an affinity for each other that will come back into play at the very end.
Before we get waist-deep in the plot, or rather the prolonged chase sequence as I had mentioned, let’s talk a bit more about Chesterton’s faith and politics, and how they figure into what is a deeply religious and political novel. Chesterton is now known as a Catholic apologist, although he didn’t convert to Roman Catholicism until fairly late in life, a good 14 years after The Man Who Was Thursday was published; he was, however, already a devout Anglican who had written essays and books aimed at Christian readers, regardless of denomination. One reason I suspect this novel works with readers who may or may not share Chesterton’s faith is that while the dialogue and even character functions are laced rather strongly with Biblical meaning (Rosamond is a walking symbol of Christian grace), it’s not a work that gets stuck in the quagmire of church minutia. Just as an example, you have to admit that if you’re a secular (or even non-Catholic) fan of Gene Wolfe that his work can occasionally be stifling with its uniquely Catholic symbolism. Or to use another example, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a very good novel, but its dead give-aways as a pre-Vatican II novel meant it became dated just a few years after publications. The Man Who Was Thursday has no such issues, and while Chesterton’s both-sidesing of police and anarchists can come off a bit centrist in a way, the notion that police are not embodiments of good necessarily (Syme notes at one point, with dismay, that one of the police’s functions is to terrorize London’s working class) can actually be taken as a progressive stance. Granted, Chesterton’s framing of anarchism is unflattering (especially given Gregory’s symbolic purpose, which we’ll get to), but it could be a lot worse for 1908.
There Be Spoilers Here
Three, then four, and so on, Syme discovering that each man in the Council is an undercover cop, such that ultimately everyone in the Council (even the Secretary) who isn’t Sunday is secretly a cop—yet none of these knew any of the others were police. Each man admits to having been recruited into the service by a man in a dark room, a man none of them can identify. Each man has taken on a disguise, and each encounter has that disguise peeled back to reveal a man of nobility—if also eccentricity. Professor de Worms is shown to be a stage actor underneath his old-man makeup, the Marquis is shown to not be quite as statuesque a man as thought since much of his bulk turns out to be padding, Dr. Bull’s eerie spectacles come off to reveal a youthful innocence, and so on. Each man is not quite what he appears to be, which is fitting considering the climax of the novel takes place at a masquerade, whose unlikelihood by this point goes unopposed given how the action has escalated into unlikelier and unlikelier territory. I called much of this novel a chase sequence, but it could also be likened to tumbling down a rabbit hole. The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland comparison is apt, and it’s one Chesterton all but explicitly makes.
I said I would refrain from quoting whole passages, indeed a hard task with such a quotable novel, but I’ll make an exception with perhaps the finest of Sunday’s monologues—or at least I feel justified in quoting most of it here. It’s a badass and memorable passage, not least because of its surrealism. Up to this point Sunday has come off as a larger-than-life figure, but as the novel approaches its final stretch it’s become clear that Sunday is no ordinary man—indeed that he might not be strictly human. What is Sunday, then? A common interpretation is that Sunday is God, although it must be said that if he’s meant to be God then he is not the merciful father figure of the gospels, but the somewhat conniving God who makes a bet with Satan over whether Job will give up his faith. Sunday is not an anarchist, but then he’s also not a cop; rather he seems to be playing both sides against each other, order against disorder, to see who will come out on top. In this light it’s hard to call him a villain, but then he’s certainly not heroic. Maybe he’s beyond human conception of good and evil?
Anyway, here it is:
“You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”
Right before taking off in a hot air balloon (yes, there’s a chase involving a hot air balloon) Sunday finishes with perhaps the biggest revelation in the novel other than the ending: “I am the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen.” After the chase with the hot air balloon, plus another chase involving Sunday on an escaped elephant, the men of the Council finally meet their tormenter face-to-face at a masquerade, one in which each of the men has been given a suit whose design corresponds with a day of the creation in Genesis. (These colorful outfits are lovingly depicted on the FFM cover, by the way, with Syme and company on a chess board, with massive hands [presumably Sunday’s] manipulating them.) Then there’s Sunday, and most surprisingly (for Syme anyway) there’s Gregory, who reappears quite literally in these last few pages. If Monday through Saturday are days of the creation and Sunday is God, then Gregory, the one genuine anarchist, is shown to be analogous to Satan. (Remember the red hair?) The very fabric of reality seems to be tearing itself apart at this point, the action becoming so heightened that the novel threatens to break through some kind of wall, from the unlikely into the impossible.
Then Syme wakes up.
The subtitle, A Nightmare, turns out to be quite literal. Of course, if this novel is supposed to be a nightmare then it’s a weirdly funny one—not horror but surreal and maybe discomforting comedy. The “it was all a dream” ending tends to be disparaged, and for good reason, a major exception being the ending of this novel, which is perhaps the most befuddling part of the whole thing. Something I wanna point out is that to my recollection The Man Who Was Thursday has only one scene break, which happens at the very end, as Syme suddenly wakes up and finds that he’s been walking and in the middle of a conversation with Gregory—only this doesn’t seem to be the Gregory of the dream. The meaning behind this one scene break, which divides the nightmare from reality, is lost in the FFM printing, wherein for some reason the editors thought it necessary to provide more conventional scene breaks. This ending is very strange, not least because of how brief it is (only half a magazine page) and how there isn’t any dialogue here. It’s ambiguous how different Syme and Gregory are from their dream counterparts, but at the very least they’re good friends in the real world. We had been reading a fantasy novel this whole time, but we didn’t know it, and neither did Our Hero™. Despite the experience of having had such a vivid dream, and somehow in the middle of a conversation, Syme feels awoken in more ways than one, as if suddenly made aware of the performance of a miracle, or as if “in possession of some impossible good news.” Even if the whole adventure with the Council of Days didn’t happen in the real world, the Christian significance of it left its mark on Syme. We even meet Rosamond again, for the first time in over a hundred pages, that symbol of grace with the “gold-red” hair (compared with Gregory’s flaming redness) who, naturally, we see tending a garden—her little Eden.
A Step Farther Out
You could go on for a while about this novel, as despite its brevity Chesterton is playing with a few layers, not to mention that’s simply a very entertaining (and increasingly fucking wild) ride from start to finish. The Man Who Was Thursday is at once a spy novel involving a council of anarchists and also an Alice in Wonderland-esque journey backwards to the beginnings of Judeo-Christian theology. It works because even if you disagree with Chesterton’s religious views (as indeed I disagree), not to mention his not-totally-flattering depiction of anarchism, it still has the capacity to entertain and provoke thought. I’ve read it twice now and I can say it’s easily the best novel I’ve covered on this site, and was probably the best novel ever printed in Famous Fantastic Mysteries. It’s fairly accessible for an Edwardian novel, but it’s also very unusual in that it’s not a realistic novel at all. Reading The Man Who Was Thursday is like getting drunk and then taking an edible, and then an hour later some dude walks in and starts reading Bible passages aloud at you after the edible’s taken effect.
Not much to update on for this month, although I did decide to shake things up for slightly for what I’ll be covering. See, for a while I was gonna do a whole tribute month for Clifford Simak, like I did for Fritz Leiber almost two years ago; but truth be told I’m not sure if I’ll do a whole month of reviews for one author like that again. It can be fatiguing to read a ton from one author, even one as diverse in his output as Leiber; and I can tell you Simak is not as diverse. I do have a compromise, though, since it’s gonna be the man’s 120th birthday in two days and I wanted to do something special. So instead of one Simak story we’re getting two. Not only that, but I’m making an exception for my “one story per magazine a month” rule (excepting F&SF this year, as you know) so as to pick two Simak stories from the pages of Galaxy Science Fiction. Simak was such a prolific contributor to Galaxy that I feel it’s only right to double dip here.
Another quirky choice I decided to pull was this month’s complete novel, which is not only a certified classic of “literary” fiction but a fantasy novel that people tend to not think of as such. Whether The Man Who Was Thursday “really” counts as fantasy was a point of contention even when it was printed in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, with people in the letters column loving the novel but questioning its fantasy credentials. But fuck you, I’m counting it. Aside from Simak we have a fairly diverse roster of writers, none of whom I’ve previously covered on here. We also have a few stories I would consider appropriate for summer reading, in that they take place in warm climates and/or involve aquatic life.
Let’s see here…
For the novellas:
“No Life of Their Own” by Clifford D. Simak. From the August 1959 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. For the story I picked to cover on Simak’s birthday I figured I may as well pick a story that also had an August release date. When Simak restarted his writing career in the late ’30s he would be a regular at Astounding Science Fiction for the next decade, but in the ’50s it quickly became apparent Galaxy would be his new go-to outlet. Incidentally the ’50s also saw Simak’s most prolific period as a short fiction writer.
“Surfacing” by Walter Jon Williams. From the April 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Williams had started out as a “mainstream” writer in the early ’80s, but by the latter half of that decade he had moved to writing SF. His rise to prominence happened to coincide with the cyberpunk movement. Bit of a funny story: this is a semi-reread for me, since I got about halfway through “Surfacing” a year or so ago, but due to circumstances outside of my control I wasn’t able to finish it at the time. I’m correcting that now.
For the short stories:
“Retrograde Summer” by John Varley. From the February 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Varley debuted in 1974 and within just a couple years rose as arguably the most imaginative and exhilarating new writer in the field. His Eight Worlds stories especially (of which “Retrograde Summer” is one) pointed towards a writer who was a breath of fresh air at the time.
“The Voices of Time” by J. G. Ballard. From the October 1960 issue of New Worlds. Ballard would later see mainstream recognition, of a sort, with his highly controversial novel Crash and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun. In the ’60s, however, Ballard was known as one of the quintessential figures in the New Wave. This story is an example of early Ballard, from before the New Wave.
“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” by Octavia E. Butler. From the May 1987 issue of Omni. Butler was a respected author in her lifetime, winning multiple awards, but her reputation seems to have gotten a second wind in the years following her death. She was a somewhat prolific novelist, but she wrote very few short stories—which didn’t mean there was a dip in quality.
“Dusty Zebra” by Clifford D. Simak. From the September 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Simak had been with Galaxy from literally that magazine’s first issue, with the serialization of his novel Time Quarry (or Time and Again), and from there he was a constant presence. Given the subject matter, “Dusty Zebra” may or may not be a precursor to Simak’s more famous “The Big Front Yard.”
“The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer. From the November-December 2023 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Kritzer has been around for a while—actually way longer than you’d think, considering she only started getting real awards attention in the 2010s. This story here just won the Nebula, and is currently a finalist for the Hugo, making it the most recent story I’ll have covered.
“There Used to Be Olive Trees” by Rich Larson. From the January-February 2017 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I remember reading a few Larson stories in the past and assuming he was older than he really was, which says something about his skill. Larson made his debut in the early 2010s while still a teenager, and has been writing at a mile a minute ever since.
For the complete novel:
The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton. From the March 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. First published in 1908. This is kind of a treat for myself, since not only is this a reread but The Man Who Was Thursday is also one of my favorite novels. Chesterton is known for his Father Brown detective series, and for being a celebrated Catholic apologist; but before his conversion he wrote one of the pioneering (and still one of the weirdest) espionage novels with this month’s pick. Interestingly this seems to be one of the rare cases of a “complete” novel in FFM actually being unabridged, the only omission being a poem at the beginning dedicated to a friend of Chesterson’s which is not part of the novel itself.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 